THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR

SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.

THERE has been a lot of understandable concern and panic in some corners over the reports of a healthy man in Hong Kong being the first reported case of reinfection in the world.

On the face of it, this looks like bad news but it really isn’t unexpected.

Across the world there are over 24 million confirmed cases of the virus – in reality that number is far, far higher.

So there have probably been many of these re-infections that we never found.

We will start to see these reports come in but it’s important to look at the context.

When the young man first had the virus, he was sick enough to be in hospital and spent 14 days there recovering.

The second time he was picked up in an airport through saliva testing completely well.

If it wasn’t for mass, widespread testing we would never have known he had the infection as he had no symptoms at all.

There are question marks around whether asymptomatic people spread the virus.As people who have already have been infected act no differently to anyone else, there should be no differences in their infectivity.

To me, it looks like his immune system is working well. It had a nasty fight with the virus a few months ago, but it remembered how it dealt with that strain so was able to easily fight off this slightly altered version.

It also raises the question of how the virus is changing its behaviour – but that’s for another column.

In my view, there’s no reason to panic. Our immune systems are fabulously complicated things which protect us in ways even the most qualified immunologists don’t understand.

I just hope our man in Hong Kong isn’t too bored with his second round of quarantine.