High risk imo. I would normally tell him to get the vaccine (if asked for my opinion) .
You don't realize how crazy your reasoning is! Of course , you are right about your golf buddy, he should get vaccinated, but you are dead wrong about your own chances. Being in good physical condition has no bearing on the odds of contracting covid. The virus doesn't go around measuring peoples biceps or checking their drivers licenses to find out how old they are. If you're in good health your odds of just getting very sick as opposed to dying go up. And you coud get monoclonal antibodies if you catch it early enough. But at best, you are playing Russian roulette with the lives of those around you. How stupid is that!
Your buddy is making a big mistake. PCr will show positive even in case of a few viral particles. (In theory it can detect, with enough cycles a single virus -- in practice such a low level of infection is hugely impacted by sampling error and other factors, making such low levels of detection highly unreliable. But PCR can routinely pick up very low levels of infection; levels that are not likely to engender much of an immune response. That's one reason why we find people who are infected, according to PCR, but asymptomatic. These asymptomatic people are not experiencing an immune response! Therefore they will not be immune to future infection from Covid, depending on their initial viral load. (The other reason for a lot of asymptomatic suspected infections was the early antibody quick tests that proved almost worthless. They had up to 50% false positives. They weren't specific enough for Covid-19 antibodies. (There are probably at least 1000 corona viruses. They are very common.)
The reverse transcriptase PCR that is used-- looking for RNA not DNA-- doubles the amount of viral RNA present at the end of each previous cycle. The problem with PCR is that it can be
too sensitive. And therefore is capable of giving a positive result even when the initial viral load is too low to induce a robust immune response. That's why the number of cycles associated with a + are usually reported (Should be!) It is also very sensitive to lab technique. sterile technique is required, and it's extremely vulnerable to contamination. It's good only in the right hands. It's the best we have, other than PCR followed up with ELISA, for example. (Excellent, but expensive!)
I would not be complacent if I were you. And you should warn your golf buddy that he should not be complacent either.
We didn't have these problems with other viral infections such as influenza. Because we didn't typically use PCR! So we didn't detect all those infected but asymptomatic, although the number of asymptomtic influenza "cases" is bound to be similar as for covid infections. Our routine tests for influenza are not sensitive enough to turn up most asymptomatic influenza infections.
Bottom line, if you tested positive for Covid by either dipstick or PCR, but remained asymptomatic assume you are not immune to reinfection!!! The symptoms are associated with an immune response. No symptoms, no significant immune response!!!!
This raises the question of whether we should even by classifying asymptomatic "infection" as infections. Doing that is quite misleading. To be classified as infected, we should require a significant immune response, and that would eliminate most asymptomatic, so-called infections. Nevertheless would useful to know accurately the number of proved asymptomatic "infections" . We have no reliable data for this. Perhaps some other nation does, but I doubt it. We have so many people that claim to have been exposed to Covid, never developed symptoms and were never tested.
