Can an omicron be infected twice?

Al-Hurra website stated that at a time when cases of Covid-19 disease are rising and public health officials are warning that everyone may be exposed to the Omicron mutant, a report by the “Prevention” website answers a set of questions about the return of infection, that is, the possibility of infection again.

First, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains that re-infection means that a person has been infected once, recovered from the disease, and subsequently contracted the same disease again. In response to a question about the possibility of infection with Omicron after infection with a previous type of Corona virus, Thomas Russo, Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Buffalo in New York, answers, saying: “Yes, absolutely.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that people who have been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and those who have already had the virus have a “low risk of subsequent infection” for at least six months.

But “there is a lot of variation from person to person and factors such as how severe the symptoms are, the new mutations, the immune response,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.Schaffner added: “Omicon is like everyone else, having it does not mean not getting injured again.”

Martin J. Placer, director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers University, agrees. “Just as we’ve seen during the course of an epidemic, one infection does not necessarily protect against another,” he says.

In the same vein, recent research from Imperial College London found that the risk of reinfection with an omicron is 5.4 times higher than with the delta mutant.

As for the possibility of being infected with the Omicron mutated twice, explains Stanley Weiss, a professor at Rutgers College of Medicine, New Jersey, citing a lecture attended by a virologist in South Africa, where Omicron first appeared, and who said that doctors in the country have seen many people who have been infected again with Omicron. .