Immunity acquired through previous infection is less effective against Omicron than against other variants, but the risk of severe COVID-19 remains low.
. Now Abu-Raddad and others are revealing how well Omicron can evade antibodies produced during previous SARS-CoV-2 infections. “The ability of Omicron to infect people with either vaccine- or infection-derived immunity is a key part of what made the recent surge so large,” says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Understanding reinfection rates is crucial for assessing “how infections might surge and if hospitals will be able to cope”, says Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.The first signs of Omicron’s immune-evasive properties came from data collected in South Africa, says Bennett.
The UK Office for National Statistics in Newport has also seen a sharp increase in possible reinfections in recent months, as part of its random sampling of households across the country. The survey counts a possible reinfection if four months have passed since the previous one. The reinfection risk was 16 times higher between mid-December last year and early January this year when Omicron dominated, than in the 7 months leading up to December when Delta was the dominant variant.
Such surveys could be underestimating the true rate of reinfection because some infections go undiagnosed, and some could have happened sooner after the first infection — especially in countries where cases of Omicron quickly followed a Delta wave, says Bennett. Multiple factors could explain the spike in reinfections, she says. With more people now already exposed to the virus, there is a higher chance of seeing reinfections. Omicron’s speedy spread also increases the chance. But the variant’s ability to evade immunity is probably playing a part, says Bennett.
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