By now you know someone — maybe even multiple someones — who have been reinfected with COVID-19. Or maybe you’ve been faced multiple infections yourself. COVID reinfection
Despite vaccines, boosters and natural immunity, the highly infectious Omicron variant appears capable of getting around whatever protection you might have gained against SARS-CoV-2.
Even President Joe Biden – famously vaccinated and fully boosted – announced July 21 that he’d contracted COVID-19 and was suffering from a runny nose, fatigue and occasional dry cough.
RELATED: Biden Tests Positive for COVID-19, Experiencing “Mild Symptoms”
Why BA.5 is so contagious
The latest Omicron subvariant — BA.5 — is causing reinfections to occur more often in prior COVID patients, according to surveillance data from the gene sequencing company Helix.
The share of new COVID-19 cases that are reinfections nearly doubled in recent months, rising from 3.6% during May’s BA.2 wave to 6.4% as BA.5 became the dominant strain in July, according to Helix’s data as cited by CNN.
And now BA.5 has become America’s dominant strain, accounting for 80% of new infections, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“BA.5 is actually the most immune-evasive SARS-CoV-2 subvariant that we’ve seen up until this point, which is pretty scary,” says John Bowen, a researcher in the department of biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle.
The COVID-19 virus mutates more often than first thought, and its mutations have proven more infectious than earlier strains, says Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the Bethesda, Md.-based National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
“We did think that once you had gotten infected, you would have fairly long-term protection — not complete, but fairly long term,” Schaffner notes. “This is clearly not the case with Omicron. Omicron has the capacity to be extraordinarily contagious. And in that context, it can infect people who are previously vaccinated and previously recovered from natural infection.”
Vaccinations, boosters and previous infections can still help prevent more severe cases of COVID-19, but they don’t provide such strong protection against initial infection and mild illness, Schaffner shares.
“In order for real serious disease to take place, the virus has to leave the respiratory tract, travel through the