Covid-19 is a type of virus that does not mutate much at all. It has error correction in replication.
Across all the variants found globally so far, there have only been changes to 20 base pairs - most of which (possibly all) do absolutely nothing.
Your immunity will likely make any re-infection much much lighter - even many years from now.
Interestingly, Coronaviruses generally, can still re-infect you even after you've developed immunity (or been vaccinated) - albeit to a much lesser extent. It's one advantage they have over influenza, and why they can get away with error correction.
can you, or someone who understands this, explain to the layperson what this means.
the last sentence in particular, what does reinfection have to do with error correction (what is error correction (assuming it has to do with the genome)?)
Because without error correction the mutation rate goes way up which might get you to squeak by an already alerted immune system and achieve reinfection. That's why you get new strains of the flu all the time. Error correction means that the genome will be very close to the one observed the previous time, so if you want to re-infect you need the immunity to last relatively short or be less than perfect. That secondary (or even later) infection would normally go unnoticed though.
Across all the variants found globally so far, there have only been changes to 20 base pairs - most of which (possibly all) do absolutely nothing.
Your immunity will likely make any re-infection much much lighter - even many years from now.
Interestingly, Coronaviruses generally, can still re-infect you even after you've developed immunity (or been vaccinated) - albeit to a much lesser extent. It's one advantage they have over influenza, and why they can get away with error correction.