Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with coronavirus: study

Re:Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with... by joe_the_user on Monday April 20, 2020 @08:38PM (#22930583)

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-...

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Re:Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with... by Izkata on Monday April 20, 2020 @09:29PM (#22930924)

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.

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Re:Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with... by in_cahoots on Monday April 20, 2020 @11:29PM (#22931571)

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.

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Re:Hundreds of thousands in L.A. may have been infected with... by arcticbull on Monday April 20, 2020 @10:44PM (#22931306)

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.

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