The most important question here is: Can reinfected people spread the coronavirus to others?
So what can we learn about reinfection from these case reports and the relatively scant data they provide? Not much. But now we can begin to see how it aligns with other evidence about reinfection and immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and develop hypotheses that can then be tested in more rigorous clinical studies or in experimental models.
Most commonly, a PCR test is used to diagnose SARS-CoV-2 infection, which specifically detects and amplifies a small piece of the viral genome directly. But antibody tests, which are what’s most relevant here, quantify antibody titers. Some can also determine how many neutralizing antibodies in a serum sample can inactivate either authentic SARS-CoV-2 or a surrogate virus.
This leads to a second interesting observation: The patient was completely asymptomatic throughout the course of the second infection, and afterward, he had detectable IgG antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein. This could be explained by the presence of immunological memory, or immune cells that “remember” the virus from the first infection, even if antibody titers were too low to detect using a lab test.
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