Vaccination and booster status did not improve survival or hospitalization rates in people infected more than once. “Reinfection with COVID-19 increases the risk of both acute outcomes and long-term COVID-19,” study author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, told Reuters. “This was evident in unvaccinated, vaccinated and boosted people.” The study was published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine. The researchers analyzed data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs:
443,588 people with first SARS-CoV-2 infection 40,947 people who were infected twice or more 5.3 million people who were not infected with the coronavirus, whose data served as a control group
“In recent months, there has been an air of invincibility among people who have had COVID-19 or their vaccinations and boosters, and especially among people who have had an infection and also received vaccines. some started to [refer] in these individuals that they have a kind of hypersensitivity to the virus,” Al-Aly said in a news release from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Without equivocation, our research showed that being infected a second, third or fourth time contributes to additional health risks in the acute phase, i.e. the first 30 days after infection, and the months after, i.e. the long phase of COVID.” Getting infected with COVID-19 more than once also dramatically increased the risk of developing lung problems, heart disease or stroke. The increased risks remained for six months. The researchers said a limitation of their study was that the data came mostly from white men. An expert not involved in the study told Reuters that the Veterans Affairs population does not reflect the general population. Patients at VA health facilities are generally older with more than normal health complications, said John Moore, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Al-Aly encouraged people to be cautious as they plan for the holiday season, Reuters reported. “We were starting to see a lot of patients coming to the clinic with an air of invincibility,” he told Reuters. “They asked themselves, ‘Does recontamination really matter?’ The answer is yes, it absolutely does.”
