Every day, Le Parisien is mobilized to answer your questions. Today, Jacques asks himself: "Is a person who has recovered from the coronavirus immune? "
In early March, the French government, like the British government just a week ago, was betting on group immunity rather than social distancing to fight the coronavirus epidemic.
The principle is to let an epidemic of contagious disease die on its own from the moment when a majority of the population is immunized. This can be achieved by vaccination (which does not yet exist for Covid-19) or the development of antibodies following a primary contamination. A strategy that therefore only works with the certainty that a person is immunized after contracting the disease.
At the end of February, Chinese media reported that in the city of Guangdong, in the south of China, 14% of the people healed from Covid-19 had again tested positive a few weeks later. Enough to fear that having caught the disease does not lead to immunity.
The virus can mutate
But in reality, there is little chance that these people have been re-infected. Evoking a Chinese patient who was supposed to have been infected twice, Marie-Paule Kieny, virologist and former Assistant Director-General of WHO, explained to us on March 16 that this patient was "probably discharged from the hospital with still viral load. The Chinese have conducted animal studies and animals do not contract the disease. This goes for the short time. No one knows if you can get infected again a few months later. "
A priori, people who have caught Covid-19 and are cured of it, are therefore immune. But the virus could mutate, take another form. People immunized with the first strain of the virus may then very well contract it again, in its mutated form.
This is what happens every year with the flu: the disease progresses and the vaccine changes from year to year to adapt to the new strain of the virus. If we get vaccinated a year, we are not guaranteed not to get another form of flu a few months later.
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