It is very unlikely for someone to become reinfected with COVID-19 after just a few months, health experts told The New York Times.
The media is circulating numerous anecdotes about people contracting COVID-19 twice in a short period of time. The Times spoke with nearly a dozen experts who said these cases may actually involve one longer illness in which the virus recedes in the body for a time before resurfacing, causing another bout of symptoms.
"I would say reinfection is possible, though not likely, and I'd think it would be rare," Angela Rasmussen, PhD, a virologist at Columbia University in New York City, told the Times. "But even rare occurrences might seem alarmingly frequent when a huge number of people have been infected."
While various studies have suggested that COVID-19 antibodies fade within one to three months, health experts said this decline is normal and noted that memory T cells and B cells can also help fend off viruses.
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