People can catch Covid repeatedly

IT’S the question that many want the answer to. Can you catch Covid-19 once you have already had it?

The answer, according to the Director of Public Health for Birmingham, is yes. Dr Justin Varney said international evidence suggests it is possible to catch the virus again.

He explained that Covid-19 is from the same family of viruses as the common cold, added: “What we are seeing is that about a third of the people who we know definitely had Covid-19 don’t develop antibodies so their body just doesn’t learn to defend itself. And of the two thirds that do deliver antibodies, about one third of those forget how to do it quite quickly so the body doesn’t quite work out how to marshall a response.

“And this is similar with what happens with the common cold where we can catch it two or three times in a year and after a couple of months our body just forgets how to defend itself.

“Even if you are one of the few people who know you have got antibodies to Covid, my advice is that doesn’t change anything. “We cannot be confident at the moment that those give you protection.”

Dr Varney explained that any vaccine is designed to get our bodies ‘‘super smart’’ in producing a response to the deadly virus. “Often we give people vaccines to illnesses that they might have been exposed to but the body’s learning is not really good.

“The vaccine is like the super exam test, once you have passed it you are pretty solid if you are going to get attacked by this virus again. “So once we have this vaccine, then we will be much more confident that people who have been vaccinated, their body has got a strong enough response if they see the virus again.”