Can You Catch Coronavirus All Over Again?
It’s been almost a year since the coronavirus outbreak started and changed our lives. Despite planet-wide efforts of health experts and researchers, there are still a lot of things we don’t know about this terrible virus.
What is the full range of symptoms? How many people are really infected? Can children spread it? Does the virus mutate? Can face masks really protect us? There are so many questions and so many important things we still don’t understand about the novel coronavirus. The more we think about it, the scarier it gets.
One of the questions that’s been on people’s minds recently is: Can you catch coronavirus twice? To answer that question, we first need to understand the relationship between the immune system and the virus.
Coronavirus and the immunity system
COVID-19 is not that different from how the common cold or influenza viruses attack the body. The immune system’s response is also quite similar in that it tries to fight off the intruder the minute it detects it in the body. This is called the innate immune response. In the case of simple colds, the rapid response does the trick but when it comes to more powerful viruses, like SARS-CoV-2, you need the adaptive immune response. At that stage, your immune system produces antibodies and T cells that attack only the infected cells and kill the pathogen. The more severe the symptoms, the stronger the response.
