Can I get COVID-19 again? What to know in California during latest rise in cases
COVID-19 cases are on the rise in California again, and the increase isn’t sparing those who’ve already had the virus.
“COVID is not over,” said Dr. Lekshmi Santhosh, medical director of University of California, San Francisco’s Post-COVID Optimal Clinic.
Mask mandates were lifted in February and April, people returned to in-person work and holiday gatherings. Roughly a month later, infections are climbing.
As of May 6, the seven-day case rate was 17.7, a jump from 6.8 on April 6, according to the state’s public health dashboard.
I had COVID already. Could I get infected in the next surge?
Even if you had COVID already, you can still get infected, doctors said.
Precise immunity periods after previous infection is still undetermined.
Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious disease at UC Davis Health, told The Bee in January that while it’s rare to get COVID again within 90 days of infection with certain variants, people can get it again. With the BA.2 variant, some people were reinfected in less than 90 days.
“Although most cases of reinfections appear to be milder than the first infection, or a prior infection, that’s not a guarantee,” said Dr. Otto Yang, immunologist and professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at University of California, Los Angeles.
A study of 17 reinfection cases from the Journal of Investigative Medicine showed that symptoms can vary. The results included 11 patients having similar severity as their first case, three having worse symptoms, two having milder reactions and one immunocompromised patient dying from severe symptoms with the second infection.
Yang, who was also one of the main investigators that ran COVID treatment trials at UCLA, added that more deadly variants can emerge.
“The more the virus circulates, the more chance there is of a new variant arising,” he said. “And the fact that omicron was less deadly than delta, I think that was just random chance.”
I have long-term COVID-19 symptoms. What does reinfection mean?
Yang said it’s hard to know what reinfection will mean for people experiencing post COVID symptoms. Since long COVID is typically a mixture of different conditions, which include respiratory, heart, digestive and neurological symptoms, Yang said he thinks a second case could exacerbate conditions.
In an email, Santhosh said that there are still people suffering symptoms from COVID infection after contracting the virus more than two years ago.
But research on what long COVID is and its effect on people is still ongoing.
According to UC Davis Health, theories on why people get long haul symptoms include the virus potentially remaining in patients’ bodies in some form or their immune systems are overreacting even though the infection period passed.
On the bright side
The good news is, Yang said, there are treatments available to prevent severe illness from the COVID virus. When diagnosed early, patients can be prescribed the FDA approved Paxlovid, an oral antiviral for COVID, or Remdesivir, an injectible antiviral.
“Those treatments, given early, have remarkable efficiency in preventing people from getting severely ill,” he said. Yang also worked on trials at UCLA that helped support Remdesivir and Baricitinib, another COVID treatment, for FDA approval.
“So that’s a nice safety net, but I think that people should still try to avoid getting infected in the first place, if possible.”
What people can do
To protect against the latest rise in cases, Santhosh and Yang said people should get vaccinated and boosted, and wear protective masks.
“Even if a person themselves has really low personal risk of getting severely ill because they’ve already had it, or because they’ve been vaccinated, or both,” Yang said, they can still get reinfected and pass it on to someone else.
This story was originally published May 13, 2022 at 9:57 AM with the headline "Can I get COVID-19 again? What to know in California during latest rise in cases."