bloodstream to other organ systems, and during that travel through the bloodstream is when the antibodies that we create from the vaccine can glom onto the virus and prevent it from localizing throughout the body,” he adds.
“But the virus attaching to the back of the throat, to the nose, to the bronchial tubes, that’s a very easy thing to do,” Schaffner continues. “It turns out that’s a much harder thing to prevent than the transport of the virus through the bloodstream.”
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Are boosters still effective?
Bowen led a study recently published online in the journal Science that came to one reassuring conclusion — all existing vaccines provide pretty good protection against the Omicron variants.
“Even despite how immune evasive this thing is, vaccines actually do still do a pretty good job of neutralizing the virus, and we know neutralization is correlated with protection,” Bowen says of the BA.5 variant. “So we think people are going to be pretty decently protected.”
Another piece of mixed news comes from Helix, which found that the average time between COVID-19 infections has increased in recent months.
Even though reinfections are more common, a person on average had 270 days between COVID infections in July, compared with 230 days between infections in April.
“This indicates that the vast majority of reinfections are still occurring in people that were originally infected before the Omicron wave,” Helix wrote in a report. “However, the rate of reinfection (or how often people are getting reinfected) is rising faster than before, likely because of waning protection from vaccines and previous infections.”
An annual booster?
Folks need to get used to the idea of COVID becoming an illness you will likely acquire from time to time, just like influenza, says Schaffner and Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, N.Y.
“There’s an excellent chance that this will become a chronic viral infection that maybe or maybe not you’ll have to get an annual booster for, we don’t know that yet,” Glatt says. “And it will constantly mutate and have variants that may or may not be of different severity, a different communicability, and different potential illness causes.”
As with the flu, annual COVID vaccine boosters will help protect you against serious illness, but won’t be able to