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Covid sufferers who caught the Omicron variant will not be protected from catching it again, according to scientists at Imperial College London. The investigators say Omicron and its evolutions could explain why Covid cases remain higher than predicted in the UK. Earlier studies found that past illnesses with Covid provided some immunity against re-infection - but the latest research indicates that is not the case with the Omicron variant, The Telegraph reports. Prof Danny Altmann from the Imperial College's Department of Immunology and Inflammation, said: 'The message is a little bleak. Omicron and its variants are great at breakthroughs but...

Public-health messaging from the beginning of this pandemic has had very little to say about immunity acquired following infection. But for most people, it is a real and pressing concern, and not only because of the vaccine mandates that have little or no regard for it. People want to know whether once recovered they can be confident of not getting it again.Must everyone live in fear forever or is there a basis for the recovered to live with confidence?We have looked at the published evidence and can conclude based on the existing body of evidence, that reinfections are very rare,...

People who have recovered from COVID-19 are at little risk of contracting the disease again, according to a study published last week.Researchers in Qatar examined a cohort of over 353,000 people using national databases that contain information about patients with polymerase-chain-reaction-confirmed infections.The studied population contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, between Feb. 28, 2020, and April 28, 2021.Reinfections were counted if a person tested positive at least 90 days after their first infection.After excluding approximately 87,500 people with a vaccination record, researchers found that those with immunity due to having recovered from COVID-19 had...

When people got reinfected with Covid-19, their odds of ending up in the hospital or dying were 90% lower than an initial Covid-19 infection, according to a new study. The study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found that there were few confirmed reinfections among 353,326 people who got Covid-19 in Qatar, and the re-infections were rare and generally mild. The first wave of infections in Qatar struck between March and June of 2020. In the end about 40% of the population had detectable antibodies against Covid-19. The country then had two more waves from January through...

People who had COVID-19 may only need one dose of Pfizer’s vaccine to be “sufficiently protected” against getting the virus again, a new study says. The research, published in JAMA Network Open on Friday, compared the antibody levels of people who’d previously been infected with those who hadn’t been, after one and two doses of the double-dose Pfizer. “We observed higher SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels in previously infected individuals after one dose of BNT162b2 (Pfizer) compared with infection-naive individuals after two doses,” said researchers from Chicago’s Rush University, who conducted the study. The scientists said they found that giving previously infected...

Yesterday I flew on a commercial aircraft from DWF on a major carrier. A carrier who has removed small children from planes for not wearing a mask. I can’t believe what I witnessed. They are allowing migrants with NO ID to bypass TSA and fly. How is this safe? Could they be infected with COVID-19. Reports are many are. Could they be terrorists? How is this safe? They come with a Manila envelope escorted to a seat with a paper stating “Help I do not speak any English”.

An Ebola outbreak now occurring in Guinea was almost certainly started by someone who survived West Africa’s historic 2014-16 epidemic, harbored the virus for at least five years and then transmitted it via semen to a sex partner, researchers reported on Friday. The current outbreak in Guinea was first recognized in January and has infected at least 18 people and killed nine."(Emphasis Mine) "West Africa’s previous epidemic infected more than 28,000 people, killed more than 11,000 and left thousands of survivors, some of whom were already being shunned because of fears about the disease. "

A variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 called P.1 seems to be able to reinfect people who already recovered from COVID-19, despite whatever protections their immune systems built up. The variant, which was discovered and began circulating in Brazil back in December, poses a new threat that has scientists worried about the potential for yet another major wave of the coronavirus, The New York Times reports. It’s currently surging in the city of Manaus, but has also spread to 24 countries as well as several US states. “It’s right to be worried about P.1, and this data gives us the reason...

Two new studies give encouraging evidence that having COVID-19 may offer some protection against future infections. Researchers found that people who made antibodies to the coronavirus were much less likely to test positive again for up to six months and maybe longer. The results bode well for vaccines, which provoke the immune system to make antibodies — substances that attach to a virus and help it be eliminated. Researchers found that people with antibodies from natural infections were “at much lower risk … on the order of the same kind of protection you’d get from an effective vaccine,” of getting...

When news broke last week that a man living in Hong Kong had been infected with the coronavirus again, months after recovering from a previous bout of COVID-19, immunologist Akiko Iwasaki had an unusual reaction. “I was really kind of happy,” she says. “It’s a nice textbook example of how the immune response should work.” For Iwasaki, who has been studying immune responses to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the case was encouraging because the second infection did not cause symptoms. This, she says, suggested that the man’s immune system might have remembered its previous...

Scientists have confirmed the first case of coronavirus reinfection in the United States: a 25-year-old Nevada man whose second round of the virus was more severe than the first. The findings were published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet. The man, who remains unnamed, first tested positive in April before recovering and testing negative in May. Then in June, he tested positive for the virus again, developing symptoms of COVID-19 a second time. According to the case study, his second infection included more severe symptoms than the first time around, including fever, cough and dizziness. The researchers sequenced the...

I have the feeling that this news may wind up slamming the brakes on a lot of the optimism about vaccines and new COVID-19 treatments that have been making the rounds lately. Doctors at the University of Hong Kong have concluded that a patient who was confirmed as being infected with the novel coronavirus and mildly symptomatic back in March came down with the disease for a second time this month. There are some complicating factors in his story that will likely need to be taken into consideration, but the overall message from that medical center is clear. If...

Last month, South Korean scientists made a very disturbing discovery. About 15 percent of patients who had recovered from the coronavirus was testing positive again. The same worrying phenomenon was discovered in China as well. The implications were disheartening. It meant that a large percentage of people may never become immune from the coronavirus, making an effective vaccine very difficult to create.But South Korean scientists kept investigating and have now found that it’s likely what the testing of coronavirus patients was detecting were “non-infectious” pieces of the virus that were causing the tests to register positive.South Korea uses a very...

There is no evidence that people who contracted COVID-19 and recovered are immune to a second infection, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). On today’s Daily Dose, Dr. Michael Wilkes, a professor of medicine and global health at UC Davis, says the announcement could be a game changer during the pandemic. Before the WHO announcement, many health care workers were operating under the assumption that once someone became infected, they developed antibodies that would protect them in the future, Wilkes says. However, WHO didn’t explicitly say these antibodies don’t exist, Wilkes points out. How California has faredA new...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Saturday that it was looking into reports of some Covid-19 patients testing positive again after initially testing negative for the disease while being considered for discharge. South Korean officials on Friday reported 91 patients thought cleared of the new coronavirus had tested positive again. Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea centres for disease control and prevention, told a briefing that the virus may have been “reactivated” rather than the patients being re-infected. The Geneva-based WHO, asked about the report from Seoul, told Reuters in a brief statement: “we are aware of these reports...

Researchers in Shanghai hope to determine whether some recovered coronavirus patients have a higher risk of reinfection after finding surprisingly low levels of Covid-19 antibodies in a number of people discharged from hospital. A team from Fudan University analysed blood samples from 175 patients discharged from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and found that nearly a third had unexpectedly low levels of antibodies. In some cases, antibodies could not be detected at all. “Whether these patients were at high risk of rebound or reinfection should be explored in further studies,” the team wrote in preliminary research released on Monday...

The Italian healthcare landscape includes crumbling hospitals, doctors trained on books rather than patients, and per capita spending one-third that of the United States. And Americans like to say their medical care is the best in the world, while Italians consider their National Health Service to be hopelessly dysfunctional. (In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked the Italian system second-best on the planet. But that stellar rating was based solely on equality of access on the one hand and health outcomes such as life expectancy on the other, ignoring any on-the-ground realities in between: waiting times, emergency room efficiency, surgical...

A sequel to a movie that you didn’t want to see in the first place is one thing, like Ghost Rider 2 after Ghost Rider. A sequel to having a COVID-19 infection would be something completely different. You may think that the one “positive” of testing positive for the COVID-19 causing coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) and surviving would be that you won’t get infected by that virus again. At least not during this pandemic. Ah, but is this assumption really true? Will you indeed be immune to the SARS-CoV2 after you’ve recovered from a COVID-19 infection? Some reports out of Japan and...

A woman who was working as a tour bus guide was reinfected with the COVID-19 coronavirus, testing positive after having recovered from a prior infection, said a local government agency in Japan. Osaka’s prefectural government confirmed that a woman in her 40s, who tested positive twice, was a resident in Osaka. She tested positive Wednesday after developing chest pains and a sore throat, the government told public broadcaster NHK. She had first tested positive in late January and was released from the hospital on Feb. 1 and was declared coronavirus-free on Feb. 6, the government said. However, officials said she...

China has discovered that roughly 14% of patients who recover from coronavirus test positive for the killer disease again – with the mechanism behind the virus' apparent ability to re-infect a complete mystery. This comes after Japan reported that a female tour-bus guide aged in her 40s had tested positive for the COVID-19 virus for a second time in Osaka. Normally, when you overcome a virus you gain immunity for a while afterwards which is why it is so rare for children to get chickenpox twice. ...