Assumer

Grooveshark came close, but it was always going to get shut down

Pretty sure that's what he's saying. The company gets to choose between dropping the requirement, providing a phone or hiring/retraining.

Well the article oversimplifies the linked source quite a bit in my opinion:

The article says

Volunteers experimentally inoculated with HCoV-229E showed a steep decline in antibody response over time, and the majority could be successfully reinfected a year later.

while the linked source for that 1990 study says that while the 10 study participants were reinfected, none of them developed colds a second time, and the virus shedding period was much shorter.