Antibody vs vaccine

Even if you have had covid, you can get it again. I know several people that have gotten it more than once, not the 2 different variants, the 1st type. People here are getting the vaccine after they have had it because a lot of our Native American people are dying from covid. We had a police officer from our Tribal police die last week from it.

Raddy5, you make an excellent point about the Covid tests. According the inventor of the PCR test, all it does is test the patient for virus particles, it can't differentiate between the common cold and Covid, so if you have one or the other, you still get a positive result. In fact, you would get a positive for any active virus in your system. He said that they were only to be used as a first line indicator that a virus was present in a patient but not to be used as a diagnostic tool. Bearing that in mind, a percentage of people who have been told they are Covid positive, most likely aren't but there's no way of telling how many people that would be.

As for determining which variant people have, it's my understanding that they don't find that out unless they run the genomic sequence of each individual case, and obviously that's not happening due to the cost involved. So I suspect that governments sample a few and then see what is the dominant variant in an area and then working on probability, tell people that's the one they have. Also I guess diagnostic tools are used. I know here in NZ the government has been surprised by just how short the incubation period is in our current outbreak - about 3 days from infection to showing symptoms, whereas with the previous variants it was 7 days.