Getting COVID-19 Multiple Times Is Risky for Your Health

At this point in the pandemic, it’s easy to think of COVID-19 as something closer to the flu than a dangerous disease. But even though the latest Omicron variants do cause less severe symptoms than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 is still far from a typical disease—especially if you get it more than once. In a study published in Nature Medicine, researchers report that COVID-19 reinfections could be taking a toll on some important organ systems. That risk applies to both short-term and long-term health effects, says Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and the study’s senior author. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] He and his team analyzed 5.3 million health records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs involving people who did not test positive for SARS-CoV-2 from March 2020 to April 2022, and compared their health status to 443,000 people who tested positive once during that period—then to another 41,000 who tested positive two or more times. (Most in the latter group had two or three infections, although a small proportion had four.) They studied adverse outcomes, like hospitalizations and deaths, in the health records for these groups for six months. People who had more than one COVID-19 infection were three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die than those who only had one infection. Those with multiple infections were also more v...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news