So Boris is back in isolation after being in contact with someone who has since tested positive.

I find this baffling. He definitely had the virus, quite severely. So why not test for immunity? There has been no mention of an antibody test. If he was tested and found to have little or no trace of antibodies, isolation would be understandable.

My guess is that this has caught the govt in a trap of their own making. There has been a persistent avoidance of the immunity question. It has not been discussed, afaik, so the reasons are anyone's guess. My own would be that, in the early days, it was genuinely an unknown issue and they were afraid lots of folk would use it as an excuse to kick over the traces. Since then they have stuck with that approach rather than rigorously monitoring the risk of reinfection. That risk is apparently extremely low. The failure to review it proactively and incorporate it into plans has led to today's situation.
There must be many thousands of key workers and the like who have had to self-isolate despite having had the virus. Hundreds of thousands of tests could have been avoided. A programme of antibody testing and rolling certification would have avoided so much cost and disruption.

Furthermore, this does not help the case for mass vaccination. There is a natural, common sense view that queries the effectiveness of vaccination if having the actual virus does not confer immunity, even if only short-term. The fact that the Pfizer vaccine - and maybe others - does not work by replicating the virus will be a hard sell (thanks Tiny CO2 for pointing that out).

Or have I missed something? If so, please put me out of my bafflement!

MikeHig. If you are baffled, how about me? Having contracted the disease, I had reason to believe that I was henceforth immune, at least for a time. Also given that members of my household did not succumb led me to further conclude that they were either immune (from a previous coronavirus cold) or were asymptomatic. My granddaughter is also tested every week and so far remains negative. But with all this talk of reinfection, of rapid loss of immunity, of different strains of the virus and now of the Blond Wonder having to self isolate despite having had the disease more severely than me, I realise I know nothing and I wonder if anyone does.

tomo: "- so it'll be largely and deliberately ignored."
I fear you are right. If they address it now they will be open to the obvious criticism that they should have been tracking and assessing from the start. Saving face is more important.

AK: I'm in the same situation. One of my kids fell ill while staying with me right at the start of LD1 and I followed suit some days later. I was never tested as I was not bad enough to need treatment, luckily, but am pretty certain I had it because she has since had 3 antibody tests. All were positive which is strong enough proof for me as we had no outside contacts at the time. Interestingly the levels were higher each time, contradicting the recent "study" which found declining levels.

Some positive news on immunity:
"A team from Oxford University and Oxford University Hospitals tested more than 12,000 volunteers for the presence of antibodies. Of the 11,052 who did not possess antibodies, 89 went on to contract Covid-19 over the course of six months. Of the 1,246 who did show antibodies, not one developed symptomatic Covid-19 during the course of the trial."

The full article is here:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgxwKjTXnJBTxnsvLlprMqmCZmKsr
It also describes more evidence for latent immunity.

As well as being good news in itself, it's encouraging to learn that this sort of work has been going on in the background.

A quite charming presentation in Shenzen

tomo: I've had similar thoughts.

Given the frail condition of many/most of those first in line to be vaccinated, it seems likely that some will keel over within a few weeks. That's a very slippery PR ball for the government to handle, especially as they have clearly got butter-fingers. It's not hard to picture the headlines..."my *insert treasured relative* was doing well until he/she was vaccinated".

Another point: they plan to vaccinate everyone, whatever their virus history. Afaik none of the trials included folk who had already had the virus. I would be very interested to hear the views of an expert on whether there is any cause for concern.
My layman's guess is that a "classic" vaccine like the Oxford one would just be seen by the immune system as more virus. But I do wonder about these completely novel vaccines using "messenger RNA": is there any potential for over-stimulating the immune system in someone who has already had the bug?

Lastly, afaik there is still no word on immunity in those who had the virus and have test results or even antibodies to prove it. It just seems bizarre that only "vaccine immunity" will be recognised. Yet that has the follow-on problem that they do not know whether or not vaccination stops folk being infectious even though the it stops them becoming ill. In contrast the lack of re-infections shows that "natural" immunity does not have this problem.

Puzzled of Surrey.