Margit Burmeister and Ari Allyn-Feuer both contributed to this report:  If you’ve suffered from COVID-19 and were hoping to get an immunity passport proving you can’t get the virus or spread it ever again, it’s been a bad week for you. This week brought strong clinical evidence that it’s possible for the same person to get COVID-19 twice. Reinfection appears possible, as physicians in two US states have taken to the popular press to tell us. This evidence of reinfection is dishear

We’ve been reading a lot lately about vitamin D supplementation. Some doctors suspect vitamin D could protect against COVID-19 since vitamin D can also have a positive effect on influenza. Others have suggested that vitamin D deficiency may play a role in the excess of deaths from COVID-19 among people of color in the United States and the United Kingdom. But could vitamin D supplements be the next hydroxychloroquine? While lots of doctors seem to think vitamin D supplements are a good idea

States may be reopening, but the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. In fact, some studies show cases are likely to rise, and more than ever Americans are now at risk of contracting COVID-19. Given that everyone's odds of having a run-in with the coronavirus just went up, people are beginning to wonder how much risk they personally face from the disease --- not just risk of death (though that's a valid concern), but the risk of suffering some of the nastier, potentially long-term side effects

This guest post was written by Margit Burmeister, a Professor of Neuroscience, Genetics, and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. Last month, one of my former students, Ari Allyn-Feuer, described three possible scenarios of for the ending of the coronavirus pandemic. Like SARS, we might manage to put the virus completely to rest. Therapies and public health could keep it in check until from 150,000 to 7 million people die. What Ari calls "the big burn,"