Here’s why you don’t want to get Covid again
Iknow we’re all over the pandemic. But wishing something wasn’t happening doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. So, as we embark on our second omicron wave, an important new study shows that reinfection with Covid is more debilitating and potentially deadly the second or third time around.
Ziyad Al-Aly is a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine. After seeing an increasing number of his patients getting reinfected with Covid, he decided to investigate how dangerous these reinfections might be. We already know that catching Covid-19 increases your risk of developing organ damage and of being hospitalised or even dying in the weeks and months after your infection. Al-Aly wanted to know if reinfection increased that risk even further. He teamed up with Benjamin Bowe and Yan Xie from the VA Saint Louis Health Care System, part of a network of facilities that deliver healthcare to veterans of the United States armed forces. The network also has an extensive electronic database that is updated daily.
They searched the database for veterans who had tested positive for Covid between March 2020 and September 2021. After excluding nearly 300,000 who had died within a month of first testing positive, that left more than 310,000. Of those, 38,926 had been reinfected by April this year, some more than four times. The researchers then searched for veterans with no record of testing positive for Covid. That gave them a control group of nearly 5.4 million people.
Next, they specified the health outcomes they were interested in based on previous Covid studies. Their list included deaths from any cause, hospitalisations, as well as disorders of various organ systems.
After crunching the numbers, they found those veterans who had experienced two or more infections had more than twice the risk of dying and three times the risk of being hospitalised within six months of their last infection. Those with repeat infections were also at higher risk of developing fatigue, diabetes, lung, heart, digestive, kidney, and neurological problems.
They also found that the more infections a veteran had, the more the risk increased. In other words, the risks are cumulative. Having two infections was riskier than one, and three were riskier than two. Interestingly, the risks were the same regardless of whether the veterans had been vaccinated or not.
This depressing study shows this latest wave will put our health system under even more pressure in the months and years to come. So please, let’s make wearing a mask when out and about as normal as wearing a seatbelt.