A recent study suggests each reinfection increases the risk of a bad health outcome, while another raises the prospect that infection with Omicron offers little to no protection against reinfection. However, some scientists are sceptical
Also in June, a team led by Washington University’s Ziyad Al-Aly uploaded its paper based on a large healthcare database operated by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which covers US military veterans. They extracted healthcare data for people who had been infected and reinfected, and compared that with veterans who had never been infected.
Compared with those who had been infected once, veterans who had been reinfected were three times more likely to be hospitalised and twice as likely to be dead. They were more than twice as likely to have heart or blood problems, fatigue or mental health issues. As people had more reinfections, their health problems increased.Based on this paper, we should be doing all we can to avoid reinfection, said Professor Rhonda Stuart, director of epidemiology at Monash Health.
“If you have a chance of getting long COVID from your first infection, it would seem to make sense that you have the same chance the next time you get COVID,” she said.If reinfection is worse than primary infection, this would be an unusual feature of the virus. In many other respiratory viruses, “reinfection typically results in a milder illness with a shorter duration”, said Dr Gemma Saravanos, a respiratory infection researcher at the University of Sydney.
The paper has not yet been peer reviewed or published in a scientific journal – meaning it needs to be interpreted with caution.The study used healthcare records, meaning people had to be sick enough to use healthcare. That means it might have missed people who had asymptomatic reinfections, or cases so mild they did not get tested. By oversampling people who got very sick after reinfection, the study could make the effect of reinfection seem worse.
The study also compared people infected with the original strain of the coronavirus and those reinfected with the Delta variant – which is known to be more severe.Based on that, “I would confidently predict that the risk of serious symptoms on a reinfection – compared with first infection, and for hypothetically same virus – is less,” said University of Melbourne epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely. “But time will tell”.
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