Well, that's encouraging. Now we have data for about 5 months on that. About the same on vaccinated individuals. In a year, we'll know more about how long immunity lasts, and if and when booster shots will be needed.
What do you mean? Immunity of naturally infected individuals has been tracked far longer than five months, with both empirical evidence of lasting immunity along with obvious community evidence.
Do you know why the infection rate in San Francisco was so low? There was already a ton of natural immunity due to community spread. The majority of my office in downtown SF caught COVID in January 2020, which was confirmed by negative influenza A & B tests followed by positive antibody tests once they were made available.
What is particular disturbing to me is that, despite the fact that the CDC estimates total infections to be over a third of the U.S. population (and that estimate only accounts for February 2020 onward and doesn't include last two months), natural immunity is never, ever discussed by policy makers. Why? That's a massive amount of natural immunity that continues to be purposely ignored.
It's being measured, not ignored.[1] This data is obtained by re-using random samples of blood drawn by commercial labs for other medical blood tests. In Vermont, under 3% of the population has had COVID-19. In Puerto Rico, about 49%. Huge variance by state. This does not include people immunized; the test used can differentiate.
Like Panther34543, my wife and I were infected in December in Seattle 2019. My wife had to go to the hospital (Kaiser), where they told her they didn't know what it was.
After the symptoms were identified as "COVID", we knew what had happened. At this point, I assumed the infections were endemic and I had no idea if we could be re-infected. I went remote early on, as infections started to be tracked and we had stocked up on plastic gloves, toilet paper, masks etc. before many other people.
I suspect, a number of people know that this virus was always going to be around. I expect the situation was watched to see how to best manage the fact that every person on earth was going to get exposed, by community spread or vaccine.
I'm interested in the survival rate differences between the vaccinated and those infected through community spread. I suspect, it's not very different due to deaths in my family from the vaccinated who had access to every treatment (including plasma) through Kaiser, before passing. I also suspect it's more or less surviving the flu (tough for the elderly) + a particular genetic interaction, that makes you susceptible.
