The New York Times reports:

Christy Karras and her husband received a tantalizing text the other day from friends they had not seen since February, when all four were among the first people in the United States to be sickened by the new coronavirus.

“Dinner at our place?”

It had been a week and a half since any of them had experienced symptoms, past the point when Covid-19 patients are thought to be contagious. And, assuming conventional virology wisdom applies, they were not at risk of immediate re-infection. Ms. Karras had been told she was probably “one of the safest people in the country” by a researcher she asked. She and her husband, Bill Harper, who had each endured a weeklong headache as well as the disease’s hallmark fever and dry cough, longed for social interaction.

“Let me check our calendars,” Ms. Karras typed back. “Oh, who are we kidding? Nothing on the calendar.”

So it was that the two Seattle couples entered a phase of pandemic life that most of America can still only dream of. As recently as mid-March, fewer than 5,000 people in the United States had tested positive for the new coronavirus. Some are still coughing, or tethered to oxygen tanks. Many have died.

But the first large wave of Covid-19 survivors, likely to be endowed with a power known to infectious disease specialists as adaptive immunity, is emerging. They linger in grocery store aisles and touch doorknobs without flinching. They undertake not entirely essential travel. They have friends over. They hug. [Continue reading…]