Surely those recovered are seen as "safe" due to presumed immunity?
The jury's still out on how reliable and how long-term the immunity from a cured case of Covid-19 actually is. Right now, the experts are discussing whether the handful patients in Asia that went pos-neg-pos are due to unreliable tests, a flareup of the original infection that was not
quite gone yet, or an actual
reinfection. (And IMHO that list is
still missing the possibility of immunity simply being
incomplete in the occasional patient.)
Having that said,
stigmatization and facts/logic tend to be rather
distant relatives.
but there was something about using blood plasma from recovered covid patients as a sort of vaccine.
Cure/treatment, not vaccine. The antibodies contained in the plasma flag the
currently present viruses for the patient's immune system to combat; in order for it to deal with a
later ingression, it has to learn to constantly produce antibodies
itself.Of course if the virus mutates significantly, that immunity will be partial at best...
As far as we currently know, the mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be the "usual" one for coronaviruses. High enough to allow to determine which continent one's local outbreak has come from (hence the reports that the U.S. was primarily infected by travelers from Europe, not Asia), low enough not to invalidate the theory that the similarity to bat CoVs indicates that that's where it originally came from (possibly through another intermediary host species, though), and IIUC less than the mutation rate of the common flu.
I can't help thinking that setting out purposefully to get this is, to put it mildly, folly.
The jury is
also still out on the question of residual long-term effects of an infection past. Lasting deterioration of lung and nerve tissues are possibilities currently on the table.
On the other hand, until effective treatments and/or vaccinations are available, herd immunity (after an estimated 60-70% of the populace had the infection) is the only thing that can
reliably prevent (localized) outbreaks, and thus "extra" deaths due to insufficient healthcare resources. As a species, we're pretty much facing a "one ugly bird at hand or two in the making in the labs (and we don't have the
slightest when we'll be able to get the latter)" choice there.
On a personal note ... I'm still out of nation to support family, and in the meantime, Germany introduced a general "two weeks of quarantine upon return" rule - which supposedly has been agreed upon on the federal level, but needs to be implemented as
state jurisdiction. As a result, when I return
home, I can be granted an exception from the rule, but as soon as I go on to my
workplace, the stated exceptions in §2(1)5. go poof.
(Also, out of the three states I can go
through as I return,
one is apparently unable to publish the actual legal wording online, and
another version has apparently lost the explicit end date as their state government shoved the authority to issue the exact rules further down to its ministry of social affairs.)
