搜尋結果
其他人也問了
Is Omicron contagious?
How many people died during the Omicron wave?
Can you get Delta from Omicron?
Are black Omicron deaths skewed younger than whites?
2022年1月25日 · The average hospital stay recently was 5.5 days, compared to 7.6 to 8 days during previous waves of the pandemic. The agency said the downward trend is likely due to a variety of factors, including...
2024年3月1日 · People who test positive for Covid no longer need to isolate for five days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
2022年4月7日 · Health officials determined that the omicron Covid variant caused less serious illness than previous variants, but what the virus lacked in severity it made up for in sheer contagiousness. Deaths...
- Nigel Chiwaya
- Overview
- Does infection-acquired immunity outperform vaccines?
- When should I get a Covid booster?
Immunity acquired from a Covid infection provides strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness, according to research published Thursday in The Lancet — protection, experts say, that’s on par with what’s provided through two doses of an mRNA vaccine.
Infection-acquired immunity cut the risk of hospitalization and death from a Covid reinfection by 88% for at least 10 months, the study found.
“This is really good news, in the sense that protection against severe disease and death after infection is really quite sustained at 10 months,” said the senior study author, Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
The findings may be a small silver lining to the explosive omicron outbreak of last winter. With so many people infected, many most likely still benefit from that protection against severe disease, Murray said.
Still, experts stress that vaccination is the preferable route to immunity, given the risks of Covid, particularly in unvaccinated people.
“The problem of saying ‘I’m gonna get infected to get immunity’ is you might be one of those people that end up in the hospital or die,” Murray said. “Why would you take the risk when you can get immunity through vaccination quite safely?”
The immunity generated from an infection was found to be “at least as high, if not higher” than that provided by two doses of an mRNA vaccine, the authors wrote.
While Murray and Wachter agreed that vaccination remains the safest route, having a past Covid infection should at least be considered in policymaking decisions going forward, such as vaccination requirements, they said.
“What Europe did with this evidence made a lot of sense, which is where evidence of past infection was seen as essentially equal to vaccination in terms of requirements to go into events or for employment,” Murray said.
At the very least, he added, officials should accept that evidence of recent infection is equivalent to vaccination.
Notably, the immunity acquired from infection did appear to wane more slowly than the immunity from two doses of an mRNA vaccine.
However, Murray said a booster dose would return protection to a higher level.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends waiting three months after an infection to get a booster dose.
It may be reasonable for people with healthy immune systems to stretch that out a little bit more, to six months, as the immune response continues to develop, said Deepta Bhattacharya, a professor of immunobiology at the University of Arizona.
“We know that the immune response continues to mature over the course of about six months, both for vaccines and for infections,” he said. “Waiting about six months gives you the best bang for your buck.”
Wachter said that while it’s not harmful to get a booster earlier, there is some flexibility with the timing for people who recently had Covid.
“If you are thinking about getting a booster, it’s a perfectly reasonable call to look at this and say I’ll wait six or eight months before getting my booster,” Wachter said. “That’s a reasonable conclusion from looking at the study.”
Follow NBC HEALTH on Twitter & Facebook.
2021年12月29日 · Coronavirus. 'We must adapt': CDC defends new isolation guidance amid omicron surge. The new guidance, which shortens the recommended isolation time from 10 days to 5 days for people without...
2021年11月29日 · The new omicron variant of the Covid-19 coronavirus spreads the same way past variants do. Masks work against omicron, along with social distancing and the vaccine.
2022年1月28日 · Omicron may be the dominant U.S. Covid strain right now, but others are still circulating — and there is also the possibility of catching another variant as yet to be identified.
