How Long Are You Protected After A COVID Infection Now: Even though the world appears to be “normal” around us, this winter is here to serve as a reminder that we are still in the midst of a pandemic.
As we face a new variant, XBB.1.5, which is rumored to be potentially the most immunity-yielding variant, meaning it will be easier to infect people, COVID is spreading across the country. The cases are increasing.
The level of protection available to someone after a COVID infection varies from person to person.
In the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, experts hypothesized that most people had a 90-day vaccination window. But according to Dr. Stuart Ray, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, sometimes a person gets sick again weeks after the first time, and other times a person is well for months. There’s no way of knowing which category you’ll fall into with these newest, more transgressive varieties.
People are often protected from severe disease by immunity from prior infection or vaccination, but one difficulty in this pandemic is that people’s immune responses vary widely, Ray said. “Due to individual variation as well as the number of immunocompromised states enrolled. It is extremely challenging to give general advice.
According to Dr. Jody Guest, vice chair of the department of epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, this individual variation includes your viral load (or the amount of virus in your body) and your immune system’s response to infection.
Your body “wouldn’t even remember that” if “you didn’t have a really high viral load and your antibodies weren’t really modified that would suggest you had a fairly minor infection the first time,” according to Guest, Will increase your risk for re-infection.
To top it all, we don’t have natural protection against new COVID variants.
Due to the fact that the new type has only recently been discovered, Guest claims that humans do not naturally develop immunity to them. Any protection that may exist against earlier COVID infections is unknown until a new strain appears.
So, if you contracted COVID a few months before XBB became normal, you might not be immune to it.
According to Guest, one version may not always protect you as well as the following. “We don’t fully know how it evokes our antibodies” specifically with respect to this new subvariant, Guest said.