Unvaccinated more than twice as likely to get COVID-19 reinfection, new study

Shafaq News/ Unvaccinated people are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with Covid-19 than people who are fully vaccinated, a new study suggests, underscoring the importance of vaccines in containing the pandemic.

The study, published on Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at nearly 250 patients in Kentucky who had Covid-19 in 2020 and tested positive again between May and June 2021. The authors compared the vaccination status of those patients with those of nearly 500 similar people who also had an infection in 2020 but hadn’t been reinfected through June 2021.

People who were unvaccinated were 2.34 times more likely to be reinfected than those who were fully vaccinated, the researchers found.

“If you decide you’re just going to trust that natural immunity is going to protect you, you’re more than twice as likely to get infected as those people who decide to get vaccinated,” said Daniel Griffin, chief of infectious disease at healthcare provider network ProHealth New York, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Researchers said they were unable to confirm reinfection through whole genome sequencing, the gold standard. In some cases, a repeat positive test can be due to prolonged shedding of the virus, or the body’s inability to shed the initial infection. But the authors also noted that the long period between the first and second positive tests made reinfection the most likely explanation.