prevent a mild infection, Schaffner and Glatt add.
Boost now or wait?
People with a high risk of severe COVID should make sure they are fully boosted, according to experts.
“You should get the current booster if you are somebody that is high risk for severe disease,” says Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Health Security Center in Baltimore. “While the current booster vaccinations do not do well against protecting against infection, they are important for protection against severe disease. So, if you have risks for severe disease, you will benefit from a booster now.”
But you don’t necessarily need to run out and get it before the latest COVID vaccines are released this fall, Glatt adds.
“If you have no really high-risk factors and you got one booster, you don’t fall into the highest risk groups of people, either by age or by weight or by underlying medical problems, it is reasonable to wait, especially if you’ve had COVID,” Glatt notes.
“The people that have been vaccinated and boosted with one booster and have had COVID, I tell them, it essentially looks like you’ve had two boosters,” he continues. “COVID can count as a booster. Certainly, if you’ve had COVID recently, then I would say wait to get a better booster that may be coming along.”
Further, researchers are working on nasal vaccines that might nip COVID in the bud, by preventing it from infecting the nasal tract, Bowen notes.
“The idea is that if you can block the virus at its source, which is by eliciting mucosal immunity, then potentially that’s going to be able to naturally stop severe disease like current vaccines, but also infections,” Bowen shares. “So maybe the virus won’t even be able to get into our body, but that’s something that’s going to require a little bit more time and also funding and a company to back it up.”
In the meantime, the experts agree that some communities might require masking if COVID cases start clogging hospitals, but that for the most part, such measures will be unnecessary.
“It was always going to be the case that this virus continued to mutate in order to reinfect us, just like its other family members do,” Adalja says.
“I do not think that any restrictive measures make sense in an era when we have vaccines that protect us against severe disease, rapid tests to diagnose infection, antivirals that are lifesaving, and monoclonal antibodies,” he adds.
“There will always be a baseline number of hospitalizations and deaths but what we won’t see is our hospitals going into crisis in the way that they once did,” Adalja shares.
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