People who have had
Covid more than once are two or three times more likely
to have a range of serious health problems than those who have only had it
once, the first major study on the subject said Thursday.
اضافة اعلان
Multiple infections have surged as the pandemic rumbles on and the virus
mutates into new strains, but the long-term health effects of reinfection have
not been clear.
The US researchers said their new study published in the Nature Medicine
journal was the first to look at how reinfection increases the risk of health
problems from acute cases as well as long Covid.
The researchers analysed the anonymous medical records of 5.8 million
people in the US Department of Veterans Affairs' national healthcare database.
More than 443,000 had tested positive for Covid at least once between March
1, 2020 and April this year.
Nearly 41,000 of that group had Covid more than once. Over 93 percent had a
total of two infections, while six percent had three and nearly one percent had
four.
The other 5.3 million never contracted Covid.
When the researchers compared the health outcomes of the different groups,
they found that "people who got reinfected have an increased risk of all
sorts of adverse health problems," Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist at
Washington University in St Louis and the study's senior author, told AFP.
People with repeat infections were twice as likely to die prematurely and
three times more likely to be hospitalised with illness than those who had not
been reinfected, the study found.
Heart and lung problems were more than three times more common for people
who had been reinfected.
Reinfection also contributes to brain conditions, kidney disease and
diabetes, the study said.
And the risk of such problems could increase with each infection, it
suggested.
- 'Worrisome' -
Al-Aly warned that this means that continuous reinfections "would
likely elevate the burden of disease in the population".
Ahead of a feared Covid spike during the holiday season, he called on people
to wear masks to protect themselves.
He also urged authorities to do more to stop Covid circulating.
"The reason reinfection is happening is that our current vaccine
strategy does not block transmission," he said.
"I think reinfections will continue to happen until we have vaccines
that block transmission, offer more durable protection, and are variant
proof."
The authors said the limitations of the study included that most of the
veteran participants were older white males.
When the study was released as a preprint in June, US expert Eric Topol
described the findings as "worrisome".
In a Substack post, Topol pointed out that reinfections became "much
more common" after April, when the study's time frame ended, due to new,
more transmissible Omicron variants.
In more positive news, earlier this week Al-Aly published a pre-print study,
which has not been peer-reviewed, which found that people who took Pfizer's
drug Paxlovid within five days of testing positive had a reduced risk of
getting long Covid.
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