New research suggests that those infected more than once have an increased risk of developing longCOVID and other health problems compared to those infected just once.
Alexander Truong, MD, has been seeing long COVID patients for more than 2 years but thought the numbers would have significantly dwindled by now. Instead, a steady flow of patients still shows up at the Emory Executive Park post-COVID clinic he and a colleague launched in fall 2020 in Atlanta. And among patients infected more than once, the symptoms appear worse.
"It's not like, 'Oh, I've had one, so it's OK. Now I can take off my mask, do what I like.' It has health consequences for reinfections — higher mortality rate, higher hospitalization rates, higher risk of long term, lingering symptoms," she says. "There are vaccines — new vaccines, old vaccines. There are variants — old variants, new variants, and now multiple variants circulating at the same time." involving the records of 5.8 million Department of Veterans Affairs patients that was published in in November found that patients infected more than once had significantly higher risks of death, hospitalization, heart problems, blood clotting, long COVID, and a host of other health issues and organ damage.
Nonetheless, the message for the public is straightforward, says Cheung."I wouldn't get into the weeds. The big message and big picture is that reinfections are bad."Experts say understanding reinfection risks, particularly with the newer variants and subvariants, is complicated because more people are now vaccinated compared to earlier in the pandemic.
However, consensus is growing that those who are vaccinated and end up with breakthrough infections are at lower risk of developing long COVID. in September, for example, found that people who had two COVID-19 vaccinations at least 2 weeks prior to infection had a 41% decrease in the odds of developing long COVID symptoms, compared to people who were not vaccinated at the time of infection.
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