By Christopher Curley; Healthline
With the arrival of the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19 and its even more contagious sub-variants, reinfections with the virus are becoming increasingly common.
That’s not to say that everyone will necessarily get COVID-19 or get it more than once, but reinfection should be seen as part of the tapestry of a “new normal” regarding the virus, experts say.
“Two major factors have combined to make COVID-19 reinfections more likely,” Dr. Jason Lane, the chief medical officer on the Hospital and Community Care Team at ChenMed, told Healthline. “First, the virus keeps evolving into new variants. Some are clearly more likely to escape prior immunity from infection by older variants and vaccines. Second, the immunity protection from prior infections and vaccines has lessened over time.”
Dr. Jerome Adams, a former U.S. Surgeon General, put it more bluntly.
“Because immunity wanes over time, there’s a 100 percent probability that reinfection will be a permanent feature of COVID-19,” he told Healthline. “It’s just like with the flu, which can infect you every year or multiple times per year due to a combination of new variants and waning immunity. The annual flu vaccine is how we instill our immune systems with the knowledge and tools to fight the virus during the flu season. The same is true, and will continue to be true, for COVID-19.”
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) doesn’t track reinfection data, studies from other countries suggest that reinfections are beginning to dominate the landscape of COVID-19.
One study from the Imperial College London, for example, found that nearly two-thirds of COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom were reported by those surveyed as reinfections.
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