[Sebb767]

This is pretty bad. Now, n=1, so we can't draw any serious conclusions from this, but for him/her to die even with existing antibodies indicates that the development of a vaccine is not going to be easy and lessens the effect heard immunity.

Let's hope the patient simply had bad luck.

[asdfasdfdavid]

Absolutely, this looks like the first case report of its kind so we can't draw any conclusions, but hopefully this incident draws a lot of news coverage so that the global medical community is on high alert for this disturbing possibility.

[mr_toad]

> we can't draw any serious conclusions from this

Exactly. Reinfections from other viruses are not unheard of. One case really says nothing about how likely this is to occur in other patients.

[lbeltrame]

That's why the pharmaceutical industry is not putting all eggs in the vaccine basket (but for the press, it is the only option available).

Therapies with monoclonal antibodies might handle this case, in particular, cocktails of antibodies (like Regeneron, Vir, and Sorrento are making) to reduce the risk of selecting resistant mutants (if you target multiple parts of the virus proteins, they'd have to mutate all together to gain resistance, which is a less likely event).