Are people who contract multiple Covid infections at a higher risk of complications? If the symptoms of the disease are less severe due to reinfection, experts warn of certain long-term health risks.
Covid-19 reinfections potentially lead to new risks of serious medical complications, hospitalizations and deaths, you should remember from a new study published by the website National Geographic. These results then come in the subvariants Omicron BA.4 and BA.5, which are now dominant, should make reinfections more frequent.
Recent research has shown that people infected with Omicron’s BA.1 subvariant have produced abundant antibodies that allow them to later deal with the same subvariant and previously circulating variants.
However, these antibodies proved to be ineffective against variants that appeared later, such as BA.4, BA.2.12.1 or BA.5, which is currently on everyone’s lips. What remains is the unknown subvariant BA.2.75, which is the last to emerge and about which we currently know very little, especially about reinfection capacities.
However, any new contamination carries a risk of complications that increase the risk of hospitalizations, death and long Covid, according to preliminary data from a study conducted on patients treated by the US Veterans Department’s Nursing Service.
COVID-19 reinfections may increase the likelihood of new health problems https://t.co/FcvA68JB79 “Chest pain, abnormal heart rhythm, heart attack, heart inflammation…, heart failure and blood clots… shortness of breath, low blood oxygen, lung disease,..fluid around the lung”
— Cynthia, VT (@clhvelo) July 7, 2022
What is certain is that reinfections generally cause less severe symptoms than the initial infection. But as the National Geographic website points out, a large, yet peer-reviewed study warns of the risks associated with multiple reinfections. This study shows that each reinfection specifically increases the risk of mortality, hospitalization and pulmonary, cardiovascular, renal, neurological, gastrointestinal and psychiatric sequelae.
Because the study involved only American veterans (the vast majority of whom were older males), these conclusions probably don’t apply to the general population, but are aimed primarily at older people with weakened immune systems and with pre-existing health problems. However, these new scientific elements, which have yet to be confirmed by their peers, encourage caution and the taking of measures to avoid re-infection.