As you probably know, a small number of people who have recovered from COVID-19 later test positive for the virus. The latest example of this was some sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Today, however, we got some good news on that front:
Scientists from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied 285 Covid-19 survivors who had tested positive for the coronavirus after their illness had apparently resolved, as indicated by a previous negative test result. The so-called re-positive patients weren’t found to have spread any lingering infection, and virus samples collected from them couldn’t be grown in culture, indicating the patients were shedding non-infectious or dead virus particles.
So once you recover, it’s safe to go out in public. What’s more, there’s little danger of relapse once your immune system has produced the antibodies necessary to kill the virus. Good news indeed.