London, Europe Brief News – Many people have caught COVID-19 twice over the past few months. Here is why:
In the early days of the pandemic, it was extremely rare to hear of people catching COVID-19 twice. However, the Omicron variant has changed that.
Part of it is Omicron itself – it’s better at sneaking past defences built on exposure to older and different variants.
It’s also partly a numbers game. So many of us have already been infected at some point, that a rising proportion of new infections are a second occurrence.
But getting Covid twice in a short space of time is still pretty unlikely, despite the prevalence of the latest version of Omicron.
And for most people a second infection is less likely to make them very ill.
Eventually, pretty likely – immunity fades and viruses evolve.
Most people can expect to catch the other coronaviruses – such as those which cause common cold symptoms – many times.
Early in the pandemic, that didn’t seem to be the case with Covid.
Fewer than 1% of all cases recorded in the UK before November 2021 were reinfections.
But Omicron’s different structure gives it a better chance of sneaking past the body’s early defences, which were based on exposure to previous Covid strains.
So the rates of reinfection have been about 10 times higher this year compared with rates seen earlier in the pandemic.
This new “Spring” Omicron – known as BA.2 – drove UK infections back up to record levels.
The Office for National Statistics said about one in 13 people in the UK had Covid in the week ending 2 April, although this had dropped to about one in 15 by the week ending 9 April.
This had fallen again to about one in 17 by the week ending 16 April.
