Everyone in the United States knows someone, often multiple people, who has been reinfected with COVID-19.
Despite vaccines, boosters and natural immunity, the highly infectious variant of Omicron seems able to evade any protection you may have gained against SARS-CoV-2.
Even the famously vaccinated and fully boosted President Joe Biden announced on July 21 that he had contracted COVID-19 and was suffering from a runny nose, fatigue and the occasional dry cough.
Omicron’s latest subvariant, BA.5, is causing reinfections to occur more frequently in former COVID patients, according to surveillance data from the gene sequencing company Helix.
The proportion of new COVID-19 cases that are reinfections nearly doubled in recent months, from 3.6% during the BA.2 wave in May to 6.4% as BA.5 become the dominant strain in July, according to Helix data cited by CNN.
And now BA.5 has become the dominant strain in the United States, accounting for 80% of new infections, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“BA.5 is actually the most immune-evasive SARS-CoV-2 subvariant that we’ve seen so far, which is very scary,” said John Bowen, a researcher in the University of Washington’s biochemistry department. of Medicine, in Seattle.
The COVID-19 virus mutates more often than previously thought, and its mutations have proven more infectious than previous strains, said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the Bethesda, Md.-based National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. .
“We thought that once you were infected, you would have long-term protection, not complete, but pretty long-term,” Schaffner said. “This is clearly not the case with Omicron. Omicron has the ability to be extraordinarily contagious. And in this context, it can infect people who have been previously vaccinated and recovered from a natural infection.”
Vaccines, boosters and earlier infections can still help prevent more severe cases of COVID-19, but they don’t provide as strong protection against initial infection and mild illness, Schaffner said.
“In order for real serious illness to occur, the virus has to leave the respiratory tract, travel through the bloodstream to other organ systems, and during that journey through the bloodstream is when the antibodies that we create from the vaccine can appear on the virus and prevent it from being localized throughout the body,” he said.
“But the virus attaching to the back of the throat, to the nose, to the bronchial tubes, that’s a very easy thing to do,” Schaffner continued. “It turns out to be a much harder thing to prevent than the carriage of the virus through the bloodstream.”
Bowen led a study recently published online in the journal science who came to a reassuring conclusion: all existing vaccines provide fairly good protection against Omicron variants.
“Even though this is immune evasive, the vaccines still do a good job of neutralizing the virus, and we know that neutralization is correlated with protection,” Bowen said of the BA.5 variant. “So we think people will be pretty protected.”
Other mixed news comes from Helix, which found that the average time between COVID-19 infections has increased in recent months.
Although reinfections are more common, a person had an average of 270 days between COVID infections in July, compared to 230 days between infections in April.
“This indicates that the vast majority of reinfections are still occurring in people who were originally infected before the Omicron wave,” Helix wrote in a report. “However, the reinfection rate (or the frequency with which people are reinfected) is increasing faster than before, likely due to declining protection from vaccines and previous infections.”
People need to get used to the idea that COVID will become a disease that you’re likely to get from time to time, just like the flu, said Schaffner and Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau. in Oceanside, New York.
“There’s an excellent chance that this will turn into a chronic viral infection that you may or may not need to get an annual booster for, we just don’t know yet,” Glatt said. “And it will constantly mutate and have variants that may or may not be of different severity, different transmissibility, and different possible causes of disease.”
As with the flu, annual boosters of the COVID vaccine will help protect against serious illness, but they won’t be able to prevent a mild infection, Schaffner and Glatt said.
People at high risk of severe COVID should make sure they are fully boosted, experts agreed.
“You should get the current booster if you’re someone at high risk for serious illness,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Health Security Center in Baltimore. “Although current booster vaccines do not work well against infection protection, they are important for protection against serious disease. So if you are at risk of serious disease, you will now benefit from a booster” .
But you don’t necessarily have to run out and get it before the latest COVID vaccines are released this fall, Glatt said.
“If you don’t have really high risk factors and you have a booster, you don’t fall into the highest risk groups of people, either by age or by weight or by underlying medical problems, it’s reasonable to wait, especially if you’ve had COVID,” he said. Glatt said.
“People who have been vaccinated and boosted with a booster and have had COVID, I tell them, basically it looks like you’ve had two boosters,” he continued. “Covid can count as a booster. Certainly if you’ve had COVID recently, I would say wait for a better booster to come.”
In addition, researchers are working on nasal vaccines that could cut off COVID, preventing it from infecting the nasal tract, Bowen noted.
“The idea is that if you can block the virus at its source, which is by triggering mucosal immunity, potentially this will be able to naturally stop serious diseases like current vaccines, but also infections,” said Bowen. “So maybe the virus won’t even be able to get into our body, but that’s something that’s going to take a little more time and also funding and a company to support it.”
Meanwhile, experts agreed that some communities may require masking if COVID cases begin to clog hospitals, but that, for the most part, such measures will be unnecessary.
“It would always be the case that this virus would continue to mutate to reinfect us, just as other members of its family do,” Adalja said.
“I don’t think any restrictive measures make sense in an age when we have vaccines that protect us from serious diseases, rapid tests to diagnose infections, antivirals that save lives and monoclonal antibodies,” he added.
“There will always be a base number of hospitalizations and deaths, but what we won’t see is our hospitals going into crisis the way they did before,” Adalja said.
Does the COVID vaccine protect against the BA.5 variant? A doctor answers More information: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more information about COVID.
Copyright © 2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Quote: Re-infections from COVID are now common. Will getting a booster help? (2022, July 25) retrieved July 26, 2022 from
This document is subject to copyright. Other than any fair dealing for private study or research purposes, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Content is provided for informational purposes only.