GENEVA: World Health Organization (WHO) Emergencies Director, Dr. Mike Ryan confirmed that reinfection rates may be higher after a discovery in South Africa, where there is now a surge in the number of people catching Covid multiple times.
Scientists in South Africa noted that as with other Covid variants, the risk remains highest for people who are elderly or have significant underlying health conditions. But even so, if a variant is more infectious it will lead to more deaths in an unvaccinated population.
Dr. Ryan noted that infection is diagnosed in the nose. hence an infection in the mucosa of your nose.
“So, you can be infected, you can have reinfection and you can probably find the virus in the nose but you are not sick because your immune system inside of your body is in effect mounting an immune response and can cope with that reinfection,” Dr. Ryan said in the WHO video on Twitter last week, adding that reinfection does not automatically mean severe disease.
Speaking about the ability of the vaccines to fend off the heavily mutated COVID-19 variant Omicron, WHO’s Dr. Ryan said there was no sign Omicron would be better at evading vaccines than other variants.
“We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalization, and there’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be so for Omicron,” Dr. Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, told AFP news agency.
According to BBC News, Omicron’s ability to escape vaccine antibodies is “incomplete”, as said by Prof Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute, who led the research.
He said the results, based on blood tests from 12 people, were “better than I expected of Omicron”.
Prof Sigal said vaccination, combined with the previous infection, could still neutralize against the variant. That suggests boosters may bring a significant benefit.
Scientists believe the previous infection, followed by vaccination or a booster, is likely to increase the neutralization level and will probably protect people against severe disease.
“More data on how well the Pfizer jab works against Omicron is expected to be released in the coming days,” reported BBC, noting that so far, there is no significant data yet on how the Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and other jabs hold up against the new variant.
Omicron is the most heavily mutated version of coronavirus found so far. According to reports, the variant’s ability to cause severe disease is not yet clear.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert, said early evidence suggests Omicron could be more transmissible but less severe.