> Why isn't this theory brought up more?

Because if reinfection so close to recovery were possible, it would make this virus really unique, and it doesn't really fit the available data very well. It makes much more sense that the virus takes a long time to clear after symptoms abate, and the tests have a really lousy false negative rate.

The common cold is infamous for mutating at a rate where you can catch the virus again two months after infection. And moreover, the common cold is also a coronavirus.

Moreover, if a lot of Covid infections are in the area and the virus is mutating quickly, a person might be exposed to a different strain soon after recovery and wind up infected, if the SAR-COV-19 is similar to the common cold. This would be hard to notice, since it would tend to happen as the virus was spreading rapidly anyway. It would become a problem only if people expected the virus to abate once everyone had been exposed.

See: https://www.technologynetworks.com/immunology/news/why-dont-...

No. The "common cold" is a collection of 200-something distinct viruses with the same/similar symptoms, only like 10-20% of which are coronaviruses. Most of them are rhinoviruses.

If what you were saying were true then we would be seeing a huge number of symptomatic re-infections and deaths in China and Italy. As far as I know the ‘reinfections’ have been asymptomatic. That suggests that the virus takes a long time to clear, not that it’s mutating.

There’s no evidence yet that COVID is mutating in a way that would cause reinfection. There haven’t been any documented confirmed cases, the speculative cases are much more likely false negative test results followed by actual positive test results.

The main reason should be that speculating on both this and the exposed-and-maybe-immune isn't that relevant for the more responsible approaches to managing the situation - isolation, quarantine, safety equipment, testing and contact tracing.

This kind of speculation is relevant to the more irresponsible approaches; "developing herd immunity" and "immunity certificates" but it mostly should be a reminder to "don't do that because you really don't know what you're getting into".

It’s not clear this is the responsible solution as there’s no evidence the entire process wouldn’t start again the minute restrictions are lifted due to the sheer infectiousness of the disease and the large number of people with no symptoms or limited symptoms.