:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/elfinanciero/WAUISP2FTNENRCGRLP5V4HIWGE.jpg "Have you already got COVID? Not yet the pound … reinfections will arrive in one or two years – El Financiero")
Have you already caught COVID-19? You should not claim victory, because according to one prediction, people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 can expect to be re-infected within a year or two.
But that’s not all, since if you don’t get vaccinated and don’t use a mask, the risk of reinfection is reduced to just a few months.
To estimate the durability of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health set out to analyze how antibody levels from a previous infection affect the risk of reinfection.
Because COVID is too new for long-term data to be available, the scientists combined genetic data from SARS-CoV-2, three endemic coronaviruses, and the closely related coronaviruses SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV to build a family tree. viral.
Using this tree, the authors modeled how viral traits have evolved over time, allowing them to obtain an estimate of the decline in antibody levels after SARS-CoV-2 infection and other factors necessary to understand the disease. risk of reinfection.
They discovered that the average risk of reinfection increased from about 5 percent four months after the initial infection to 50 percent at 17 months. According to the article published in the medical journal Nature, natural protection lasts less than half the time it lasts for the three common cold coronaviruses.
Jeffrey Townsend, a co-author of the study, said he was “surprised and disheartened” by their findings, which suggest that COVID-19 is likely to move from pandemic to endemic disease.
In addition to this, the researchers noted, the unknown is the probable severity of the disease when someone is reinfected.
While it is too early to make a confident statement about how quickly protection declines after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, what is certain is that immunity will decline, so there is a need for all people, even with previous infections, go to get vaccinated.
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