This is not a discovery: it is possible to catch the Covid-19 virus several times. Only here, there would be some people more likely to get infected again than othersaccording to an analysis by Public Health France unveiled on February 18.
The Omicron wave responsible for 92% of recontaminations
With the fifth wave of the epidemic and the arrival of the Omicron variant, the number of cases of people reinfected with Sars-CoV-2 explodes.
This is what Public Health France advances in its publication: 92% of the 416,995 possible cases of coronavirus reinfection appeared after December 1, 2021, i.e. when the Omicron variant was in the majority in the country. “Events of reinfection by Sars-CoV-2 are not rare events“, points out the public health agency. Certain profiles of people would even be more affected than others.
Two profiles of people particularly affected
Public Health France used data from the SIDEP portal, which lists the results of Covid-19 screening tests, to accurately determine the profiles. The agency took into account people who had at least two positive tests 60 days apart or more between March 2, 2021 and January 27, 2022.
Two typical profiles emerge:
- the people aged 18 to 40 : the possible reinfection rate in this category of the population is 52,3 % while they represent “only” 39.2% of confirmed cases of Covid-19;
- the health professionals : here, the possible reinfection rate amounts to 6 % cases for 3.4% of confirmed Covid-19 cases.
According to Public Health France, several factors can explain this trend. For health professionals it is quite obvious: they are much more often in contact with the virus because of their work. But for people aged 18 to 40, the agency explains these high numbers by “a less adherence to barrier measures and social distancing or even lower vaccination coverage”.
What is the time frame for reinfection with Covid-19?
In its analysis of the situation in France, the public health agency argues that the average time between two contaminations is 240 days on average, about eight months. She also notes that 51.4% of possible cases of reinfection were asymptomatic during this second contamination.
The public health agency says these figures have limitslike lack of information regarding vaccination statusor the minimum period of 60 days between the two infections which prevents quantifying the second contaminations occurring earlier. In addition, she specifies that “the fact that we cannot identify the reinfections that occurred following a first episode in 2020 certainly contributes to a underestimation of the frequency of possible cases of reinfection over the entire study period, as well as the increase in their frequency over time”.
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