Recovering?

This is your chance to get infected with Corona again

Reports of people being treated in Corona a second time are no longer really anything new.

What increases the chance of re-infection with the virus, and is it possible to be infected for the third and fourth time as well?

The answers are inside, and not sure you will like them

Walla!

health

24/01/2022

Monday, 24 January 2022, 07:33 Updated: 07:36

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In the video: Bennett and the ministers presented the "Testing and Learning" program (Photo: GPO)

Noa Kirl, Shlomi Shabbat and the assistant from your children's kindergarten - quite a few important people in our lives have been infected with corona more than once, especially in the current wave of omicrons.

Infection and recovery from the virus is supposed to produce natural immunization in the body, because the immune system is already familiar with the virus and therefore has specific memory cells that are supposed to detect the virus quickly and not allow it to produce disease in the body again.

Why, then, have we been hearing lately about more and more recurrent infections in the corona?

Re-infection, as it is called - a second or more infection with the virus, no matter what its strain.

The risk of re-infection may be affected by all sorts of factors.

For example, there are data that indicate that those who are not vaccinated are more likely to be infected more than once than those who are vaccinated.

It is also possible that those who contracted it very easily for the first time are at risk of getting it again, because the initial infection did not produce a strong enough immune response.

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To the full article

Different variants can have different chances of re-infection.

If you have contracted Delta, you are more likely to be re-infected from exposure to the Omicron strain, because it is different.

Whereas if you have been infected with Omicron you are less likely to be infected again.

If you are vaccinated, the length of time that has elapsed since you received your last dose also affects the risk of infection.

Usually, re-infection will be considered as such only if it occurred after 90 days or more from the first infection, in order to exclude from the statistics people who take longer to remove the remnants of the virus and may be positive for weeks after that initial infection.

Positive, and not for the first time.

Corona positive antigen test (Photo: ShutterStock)

It is difficult to say exactly how many verified re-infections have occurred - to verify this with a scientific level of accuracy, there must be a genetic sequencing of the virus that was infected for the first time, and also sequencing the virus of the second infection and comparing them. These are expensive and numerous resources, which can not be invested in all cases, even in most of them.

"With a combination of an epidemic that has been going on for two years, a decline in antibodies, two significant waves of disease in strains with immune evasion capability - first Delta and then Omicron - it can be said quietly that there will be significant re-infection," said Prof. Danny Altman, a professor of immunology at Imperial College. In London.

The short answer is yes.

Scientists from Imperial College have performed calculations, and after deducting and weighting other factors, they estimate that Omicron is associated with a 4.38-6.63-fold higher risk of re-infection, compared to the Delta strain.

According to them, this means that the protection against infection that stands for those who have fallen ill and recovered in the last six months has dropped from 85 percent before the emergence of the Omicron strain, to somewhere between 0-27 percent after it.

The sharp drop in defense is not surprising in light of what is already known about the structure of the omicron variant and its impressive ability to elude the body's defense systems.

Did it again.

The positive corona test that Noa Kirl uploaded to Instagram when she was infected for the second time (Photo: screenshot, Instagram)

Is re-infection easier?

Logic says that re-infection with the virus will cause a milder disease, and indeed there are data that indicate that the viral load in further infection is lower compared to previous infections.

This condition may also manifest itself in a milder disease.

However, the severity of the symptoms and the disease also depend on other factors - such as the patient's immune status and the characteristics of the infectious strain.

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Data from the UK, for example, show that as the alpha variant (remember it?) Became the dominant strain, recurrent infections manifested themselves in fewer symptoms, but the situation was reversed when the delta strain became dominant.

With the omicron the data currently indicate that the chance of experiencing symptoms in the second infection is quite similar to the chance in the first infection.

So the answer to this question is not unequivocal.

As mentioned, reports of people who have been infected twice are already quite common, and there are also reports of cases of third and even fourth illnesses with the virus (though much fewer).

It is difficult to say how many times it is possible to be infected with the virus, what is certain is that the longer the epidemic lasts and stays in the environment, the higher the chance and number of re-infections.

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• Corona

• covid-19

• Omicron variant