And just so folks don't think Roccus is shoveling it, here's a NYTimes summary of a Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) publication. I bolded the text regarding testing discrepancies...
Can you get reinfected by the virus? Experts say it’s unlikely.
Treating coronavirus patients at a hospital in Wuhan, China, this week. Some people have tested positive after recovering and being discharged, but experts said the issue may lie with faulty testing. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Reports of coronavirus patients testing positive for the virus again after recovering have raised alarm, but
health experts say it’s likely that faulty tests are to blame.
The Japanese government reported this week that a woman in Osaka had tested
positive for the coronavirus for a second time, weeks after recovering from the infection and being discharged from a hospital. Chinese officials have announced
similar cases.
But experts said that recovered patients should have at least short-term immunity.
The apparent reinfections could be the result of false negatives when the patients were discharged, said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The throat swabs used to examine for the virus can be technically tricky, and they can miss an infection elsewhere in the body.
“A negative test is not a definitive that there is no more virus in that person,” Dr. Lipsitch said.
Even if patients test positive long after they stop displaying symptoms, they may no longer pose a transmission risk to others, according to a report
published on Thursday in JAMA. And even if there are occasional cases of true reinfection, so far, they do not seem to be occurring in large enough numbers to be a priority.