a virus is a protein, an enzyme, which means it's a string of amino acids with a bunch of open electrons hanging off of it. the protein has a certain chemistry to it, and that chemistry creates a geometry. i did projects on viruses in grades 12 and 13 bio (i took bio 101 & 102 at carleton, but it didn't touch on this topic), but, like so many other things, this is actually fundamentally a math problem.
so, a virus is a protein with a specific geometry to it. what it does is it floats through your tissue like a spaceship and latch on to cells like a lander. once it's connected itself to the cell, it releases genetic material into it through the cell membrane (i almost said cell wall. it has been a while.). this genetic material then takes control of the nucleus of the cell, and turns the cell into a virus producing factory. once your cell is literally full of copies of the virus, it explodes like the obese man in se7ven, thereby releasing thousands of more copies of the virus, and then it all starts over again - thousands of times over. a powerful virus like ebola will turn you into mush, as your billions of cells explode one at a time.
the virus itself has no purpose other than to destroy.
how do you defeat that? what your immune system is going to do is produce something called antibodies that rely on finding the right chemical combination to create the right geometry to disassemble the virus in the intercellular spaces. and, in fact, it works by trial and error. but, once it gets the right geometry, it remembers it. forever.
forever.
so, why do you need flu shots, then? i guess some people deduce that you "lose immunity", but that is not true. what happens is that the virus changes it's geometry enough that your body no longer recognizes it, and needs to produce new antibodies for it.
so, nobody is getting "reinfected" with coronavirus. what is happening, then?
1) it might be that testing was incomplete and they weren't cured in the first place.
1) it might be that testing was incomplete and they weren't cured in the first place.
2) the virus might be evolving very quickly; these people would have been infected by two different coronaviruses, rather than the same one.