How COVID Could Screw You Worse With Each Reinfection

[Celerity]

A new study offers clues about the worsening damage COVID could inflict on your body with each round of infection.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-covid-19-could-hit-you-harder-with-each-reinfection



The more times you catch COVID, the sicker you’re likely to get with each reinfection. That’s the worrying conclusion of a new study drawing on data from the U.S. Veterans Administration. Scientists stressed they need more data before they can say for sure whether, and why, COVID might get worse the second, third, or fourth time around. But with more and more people getting reinfected as the pandemic lurches toward its fourth year, the study hints at some of the possible long-term risks.

To get a handle on the health impact of reinfection, re-reinfection and even re-re-reinfection, three researchers—Ziyad Al-Aly from the Washington University School of Medicine plus Benjamin Bowe and Yan Xie, both from the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System—scrutinized the health records of 5.7 million American veterans.

Some 260,000 had caught COVID just once, and 40,000 had been reinfected at least one more time. The control group included 5.4 million people who never got COVID at all. Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie tracked health outcomes over a six-month period and came to a startling conclusion. “We show that, compared to people with first infection, reinfection contributes additional risks,” they wrote in their study, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet but is under consideration for publication in Nature.

Every time you catch COVID, your chance of getting really sick with something—likely COVID-related—seems to go up, Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie found. The risk of cardiovascular disorders, problems with blood-clotting, diabetes, fatigue, gastrointestinal and kidney disorders, mental health problems, musculoskeletal disorders and neurologic damage all increase with reinfection—this despite the antibodies that should result from repeat infections.

snip

[Phoenix61]

1. This study does not take into account those who are asymptomatic.

Average age is 58 with the largest population between 45 and 63. This is just a sloppy study all the way around. They are studying those who sought medical care for Covid. There’s no indication how they handled those who were experiencing long-Covid and then got Covid again.

[GopherGal]

5. Well, it's an observational study...

I don't know if it necessarily deserves to be labeled as "sloppy", but it falls into the "we have this data, let's see what it looks like" category of studies, which are, from a knowledge-enhancement standpoint, inferior to "let's perturb things in a planned manner and measure the results" studies.

Since they're not taking the (ethically dubious) step of intentionally infecting patients with a given single variant of coronavirus, their data is also confounded by likely differences in variants between original infections and reinfections, which may evade any naturally acquired immunity due to the initial infection and may bring about differences in symptom profiles between original and follow-up infections from differing variants.

So it certainly carries the limitations of an observational study, which are probably exacerbated by the rapid evolution of the virus. Then again, that's the main take-home from these observations: the virus is changing so rapidly and the naturally-acquired immunity so weak, that the "let it circulate until naturally acquired immunity kills it off" strategy is not effective.

[Nevilledog]

2. Another article

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Paris Marx
@parismarx
·
Jul 4, 2022
“‘Living with the virus’ means living with a normalization of death, reinfections, Long COVID, disruption & exhausted health-care workers. People would never vote for a deteriorating quality of life & risk, but that’s where public policy is now taking us.”

thetyee.ca
Get Ready for the Forever Plague | The Tyee
Public health officials’ COVID complacency has opened the door to new illnesses and devastating long-term damage.

Paris Marx
@parismarx
·
Follow
This article expertly outlines the consequences of the path we’ve taken on Covid, including depleting our immune systems through frequent reinfection from a more rapidly changing virus that puts us at greater risk for a host of viruses and conditions.

thetyee.ca
Get Ready for the Forever Plague | The Tyee
Public health officials’ COVID complacency has opened the door to new illnesses and devastating long-term damage.
5:57 AM · Jul 4, 2022

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/07/04/Get-Ready-Forever-Plague/

[ultralite001]

3. The study cited...

is a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed...

A grain of salt is required here...

That is all...

[Celerity]

4. that was already clearly stated in my OP