I've wondered about this before, last time deciding we could get COVID twice, it's not chickenpox2020, and we need a vaccine or treatment asap.

Then a recent NYT newsletter told me this:

Separately, we spoke to experts who were comforted that three major Covid-19 trials were recently paused for safety considerations. And yes, you can be reinfected, but itโ€™s extremely unlikely.

Which got me wondering if that's not the case with chickenpox too -- maybe you can get it twice, but it's just as unlikely.

Turns out that's close to the truth. Here's one random site:

Second infections with chickenpox occur in immunocompetent individuals, but are uncommon. Such second infections are rarely severe. A soundly-based conjecture being carefully assessed in countries with low prevalence of chickenpox due to immunization, low birth rates, and increased separation is that immunity has been reinforced by subclinical challenges and this is now less common. 

COVID has, from the first, made me wonder, almost hope, its ceiling would be a nasty, horrible chickenpox redux. I'm not as young as I once was, but for almost everyone under 30, it looks like you catch it and you're done. I wonder if "extremely unlikely" to catch it again means "six months after the first time you had COVID" or "for the rest of your life after you've had COVID". 

Worst part is we won't really know anything definitively until we get that far out. As I've told those stuck near me before, "You can't know the side effects of a vaccine that appear two years after you take it before, yep, it's been two years since people started taking it." And even then, you won't know for sure you're not a special case for a while. The same goes for this virus. We don't know what it'll do, what its shingles equivalent is, for instance (shingles representing "unknown stuff that it'll do to you later, after 'recovery'"), until we get there.

Regardless, if that's immunity is a lifetime of "extremely unlikely", even if it's not as hard and fast as chickenpox lifetime immunity, strangely Trump's plan (insert maniacal laughter about the misuse of the word "plan" here) isn't as wrong as some are painting it. We want to back the virus infection faucet down from where we are now so that the hospitals are at 50%, not 100%, capacity, which the White House completely ignores. We want to slow it even further than that so that we can develop some better treatments for those whose disease goes sideways. But if, on recovery, those who do recover get anything close to lifetime immunity, we might want (we don't not want?) folks who will recover to get sick and recover as soon as possible.

Chickenpox, again, if I remember correctly, could be really serious for older people. That bastion of accurate knowledge, wikipedia, currently says, "Chickenpox is rarely fatal, although it is generally more severe in adult men than in women or children." (Sound familiar?) You wanted to get your kids sick at an age when you could be reasonably certain they could recover fairly easily. It wasn't perfect, but it was a livable world. Wonder when chickenpox "started"... Looks like no later than the 1500s. So we'd long ago taken our "first bout" deaths that we're experiencing now. Chickenpox, I wonder, might have been a lot more fearsome when it started.

Anyhow, lotta ifs. I'm a little surprised we don't have more answers. Any way you slice it, this virus is kicking our collective butts, and I'm still crossing fingers we have a good vaccine sooner than later.

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