But scientists warn that the findings do not mean that children should not be vaccinated against COVID-19.
A year and a half after an infection, the resulting immune response was still about 80% effective at preventing reinfection, the study found. But it isn’t clear how the results will translate to, which is now dominant in many countries. “There is a much less-robust immune response to Omicron among previously infected and/or vaccinated individuals,” says Yvonne Maldonado, chief of paediatric infectious diseases at Stanford School of Medicine in California.
Even so, the study — which includes data from about 300,000 children and adolescents — is a welcome addition to the relatively small pool of knowledge about , says paediatrician Nigel Crawford at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, who studies vaccinology. “They’re a group for which we haven’t seen a huge amount of data to date,” he says.The study’s authors collected data on coronavirus infections from Maccabi Healthcare Services, an Israeli health-insurance plan. They focused on the risk of infection from 1 July to 13 December 2021, when the Delta variant was dominant in Israel.
The team found that unvaccinated children and adolescents were 89% less likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 three to six months after their first infection than were children who had not previously been infected. For the 12-18 age group, this protection against reinfection dropped to 82.5% from 9 months to a year after infection and remained at around that level until up to 18 months post-infection.
Children aged 5-11, however, maintained the same level of protection. That, says Crawford, could fit with observations that young children often experience
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