Your Covid-19 questions, answered - Can My Son Be Reinfected?

Your Covid-19 questions, answered - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Covid Q&A: Can My Son Be Reinfected?

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the weekly Covid Q&A from Bloomberg Prognosis! We asked you to write to us with your Covid-19 questions and concerns, and more than 50 of you wrote in over the past week. In hopes of helping to make this very confusing time just a little less so, each week we will pick one question and to put it to an expert in the field. Our first question comes to us from Kathleen in Chicago, whose son is home from college for the holidays. Just two hours after arriving for Thanksgiving, he received a call letting him know that a coronavirus test he’d taken upon leaving campus had come back positive. He quarantined in his room for two weeks and then tested negative, as did everyone else in the household. Kathleen asked: Can my son infect other family members who don't have immunity if he visits friends and then returns to our house? “He can become reinfected, and can infect family members, but the key is the timing,” says Abraar Karan, an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that people appear to become susceptible to reinfection about 90 days after infection. But Karan says that even within that period, if Kathleen's son were to develop Covid-19 symptoms, he would need to be retested. In documented instances of reinfection, some cases have been severe enough to cause symptoms. But many cases of reinfection, Karan says, appear to be milder, making them hard to detect. Just because Kathleen's son might not show symptoms of reinfection, however, doesn’t mean he’s not spreading the virus to other people. “Ultimately, there is so much we still don't know about immunity after infection that I would be very careful assuming that this is a license to no longer take any precautions,” Karan says.