“It’s not a gamble you really want to take,” warns Pulliam. While your risk of severe disease or dying seems to be much less when reinfected, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who die on their second infection. But you should still try not to repeat the experience. Moderna is already publishing data on a broader-type booster vaccine that mixes equal amounts of the spike proteins from the OG and Beta variants, which seems to work better at providing more universal coverage against the virus.Īt the end of the day, the good news is, you’re not likely to get a severe case on your next tussle with the virus-in another study from Abu-Raddad, a reinfection was found to result in a 90 percent lower chance of ending up in the hospital or dying than your first infection. Knowing this, one solution to fighting all these reinfections, Sigal says, is to design a better vaccine. Previous work that has attempted to answer this question leans towards the latter theory.
However, we don’t quite know whether these repeat infections are due to the fact that the initial infection gives us immunity that wanes posthaste, or if the viruses themselves evolve to outsmart our previously built immunological weaponry. We all come down with a coronavirus infection about every three years sometimes even multiple times within the same year. This could be a sign that the virus is beginning to mimic the natural rhythms of other coronaviruses, which infect and reinfect us many times in our lifetimes. Some of those in the study were reinfected as quickly as 20 days after their initial infection, which, the authors write, calls into question just how suitable it is to use a minimum 60-day gap for classifying a case as a reinfection. A February preprint from researchers in Denmark suggests that the BA.2 sublineage of Omicron can reinfect people shortly after they’ve had the original BA.1 form, but the paper did conclude that such reinfections are rare. But the virus is still changing, so even if you’ve had Omicron, that doesn’t mean you won’t catch Covid again-and you can even get reinfected with the different manifestations of Omicron. It’s the sheer difference between Omicron and earlier variants that explains why the risk of reinfection has shot up. Reinfections, he says, “are becoming an accepted reality.” Post-Omicron that number dropped to about 50 percent. In a study published in March, he found that pre-Omicron, the effectiveness of a Covid infection against a reinfection hovered at about 90 percent-in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Abu-Raddad, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, has investigated how much a previous infection protects against a future one-and how much this has shifted because of Omicron. Another paper from Imperial College London published in December 2021 found that Omicron was five times more likely to reinfect people than the previously dominant Delta variant. According to data from the UK, the risk of being reinfected with Covid-19 was about eight times higher after Omicron became the reigning variant in the country compared with when Delta held the crown. Other studies have shown just how much Omicron has changed the reinfection calculation. Reinfection, Pulliam believes, is going to be a normal part of the way we live in the future. “If what’s going on in South Africa is any indication, it’s that probably people are going to be reinfected over the course of years,” she says. South Africa, Pulliam says, is uniquely placed to study reinfection, serving as a barometer for the rest of the world’s reinfection future, given that Omicron has already made its way through most of the population. You can’t get reinfected unless you’ve already been infected in the first place. At this stage of the pandemic, repeat infections would always have been more common than before, owing to the sheer number of people who’ve had Covid-19. But even setting aside these factors, it makes sense that there are now more reinfections than ever. A perfect storm of waning immunity, loosened restrictions, and an extremely transmissible variant making the rounds has meant reinfections are the new normal for many.
Two years and some change in, that novelty has largely evaporated. “When the pandemic first started, everybody assumed that once you got it, you were done,” says Juliet Pulliam, director of the South African DSI-NRF Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University.
In the early months of the pandemic, reinfections were a remarkable rarity, even making global news when discovered. Get ready for round two (and three, and maybe four-maybe ad infinitum). If you’re unfortunate enough to have had an intimate encounter with the dreaded Sars-CoV-2 virus, I’m afraid your dalliance with it might not have been your last.
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