The answer is YES.
"Troubling headlines have been cropping up across Asia: Some patients in China, Japan and South Korea who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and seemingly recovered have been readmitted to the hospital after testing positive for the virus again.
"Because SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was only discovered a few months ago, scientists are still trying to answer many big questions related to the virus and the disease it causes. Among them is whether patients can be reinfected by the virus after they seem to recover from the symptoms.
"With other coronavirus strains, experts say the antibodies that patients produce during infection give them immunity to the specific virus for months or even years, but researchers are still figuring out if and how that works with COVID-19.
"The answer has huge implications for the spread of the disease, since researchers believe it will continue to crash across the world in waves, hitting the same country multiple times."
Time Magazine, April 4, 2020
I don't know if you can read this without a subscription. That's why I copied it.
Thanks as many of us don't allow ads or cookies. This virus has been shown to evolve and it could be that it has evolved from the original strain to a new one.
In most cases, these mechanisms can be defeated by disabling javascript. I use an addon for Firefox that disables javascript by default for all sites, then I pick and choose which sites I enable it for.
@bingst You are a lot more computer savvy than I. How does one go about doing that?
@JackPedigo This is the one I use, but as you can see, it isn't recommended, but only a small number of addon's are. Use at your own risk, but I've not had any problems with it. Is it spying on me? I don't think so. [addons.mozilla.org]
@bingst Thank you.
I think the answer is that we're not sure yet.
"Experts say the body’s antibody response, triggered by the onset of a virus, means it is unlikely that patients who have recovered from COVID-19 can get re-infected so soon after contracting the virus." This seems to be the consensus I've heard from Fauci and others in the field I've heard in the news. But... we really don't know.
You have to keep in mind that a lot of those folks didn't even get a test. They were diagnosed by symptoms and in many cases x-rays of their lungs. In the absence of a genetic-based test, it seems to me that acute cases of influenza and covid-19 would be hard to distinguish.
We are all wondering about this. Thank you for sharing.