INDIANAPOLIS — As we prepare for a "Pandemic Thanksgiving," 13News viewers have been asking our VERIFY Team lots of questions about whether it's safe to gather with family and friends – especially those who have already had coronavirus.
Public safety experts recommend against large family gatherings, but even small gatherings and children returning home from college to celebrate the holiday with their parents is triggering uncertainty.
“My nephew just recovered from COVID. Is it OK for him to join my family for Thanksgiving? He can’t get anyone sick now, right?” asked Emalie.
William wrote to ask, “After recovering from COVID-19, are you now immune? For how long?”
There is a lot of information out there on this subject, but none of it is conclusive.
Here's what we do know.
The CDC says cases of people being re-infected with COVID-19 have been reported but are quite rare.
Examples include a case confirmed by the University of Hong Kong involving a man who recovered from coronavirus and then contracted the virus again about 4-and-a-half months later. The Lancet medical journal reported a Nevada man caught the virus twice – six weeks apart.
Again, there's just a handful of reported cases like these but, while rare, they do suggest getting COVID-19 more than once is possible.
If you've already had COVID, the research on how much immunity you receive – if at all – is far too preliminary to make any definitive conclusions. But a new study suggests perhaps we might get more immunity than originally thought.
Scientists at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California analyzed the blood of 185 people who recovered from coronavirus. They found 8 months after being infected, most of those people still had enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness.
Before you get too excited about that, an infection disease specialist at MD Anderson Medical Center in Texas says if you've had COVID-19, "Don't assume you are immune" because the disease hasn’t even been around for a full year and we’re still learning about it. “Even if you had a severe case and made a full recovery with no complications, we don’t know if natural immunity will protect you or for how long.,” said Dr. Roy Chemaly.
The doctor also said, even if you've recovered from COVID-19, DO keep taking all the recommended COVID-19 precautions, and DO quarantine again if you are exposed to someone who tests positive because viruses can and do mutate.
In an online post, medical staff at MIT in Boston sum things up pretty well when they wrote, "Unfortunately, we still do not know what kind of immunity a person has after recovering from COVID-19 or how long that immunity might last."
The post includes a drawing of a “COVID-19 immunity club membership card.” Who's in that fictional club and how long membership lasts, we still don't know.
That's one of the reasons federal and Indiana state public health officials strongly urge you to follow recommended COVID-19 safety precautions this Thanksgiving: remain socially distant, wear a mask and wash your hands a lot during the holiday. They also highly recommend avoiding big family get togethers as COVID-19 infection rates continue to surge.