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Modern Discontent's avatar

After posting, I probably should have asserted that this at least suggest that vaccines are not better than natural immunity- they are at least comparable, with the slight caveat that natural immunity may have a better ARR, or may not wane as suddenly as vaccinated.

I suppose if we want to get antagonistic, us natty folk can circle around the vaccinated and chant "one of us":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRe8J4scGtU

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Igor Chudov's avatar

Very interesting! When I read these kinds of studies, I always remind myself that PCR tests sometimes are false positive, giving something like 2% false positives. So if you test 1,000 people three times, you would get incidence of 60, or 6% or so, even if none of them had Covid.

This brings up a question that is actually burning in my mind: WHAT IS A REINFECTION?

For example, let's say that I, a previously infected unvaccinated individual, come in close contact with an ill person. Am I "reinfected" if I test positive some time later, despite having no symptoms?

The reason for my question is that last winter, my wife had Covid and I took care of her and did not get ill. After a week or so, I realized that on one recent evening I did feel slightly funny in my nose, which was such a fleeting feeling that it was possibly nothing at all.

But I always wonder, unfortunately without a definitive answer, what if that evening I did a PCR test on my nose and came up positive. Was I "reinfected"? It is a question to which I do not know the answer to, but it is very important for me and for all people.

My own answer, which is probably not perfect, is that a properly defined reinfection must at least involve symptoms such as fever and viremia and a reasonably low Ct threshold.

This study seems to define reinfection as a "positive PCR test", which always makes me wonder how many of those reinfections were not true illnesses.

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