Coronavirus: Covid-19 reinfection unlikely for at least 6 months, study finds

People who’ve had Covid-19 are extremely unlikely to contract it once more for at the very least six months after their first an infection, in response to a British research of healthcare staff on the frontline of combat towards the coronavirus pandemic.

The findings ought to supply some reassurance for the greater than 51 million folks worldwide who’ve been contaminated with the pandemic illness, researchers on the University of Oxford stated.

“This is really good news, because we can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who get Covid-19 won’t get it again,” stated David Eyre, a professor at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, who co-led the research.

Isolated instances of re-infection with Covid-19, the illness brought on by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, had raised considerations that immunity may be short-lived and that recovered sufferers could swiftly fall sick once more.

But the outcomes of this research, carried out in a cohort of UK healthcare staff – who’re amongst these at highest threat of contracting Covid-19 – recommend instances of reinfection are prone to stay extraordinarily uncommon.

“Being infected with Covid-19 does offer protection against re-infection for most people for at least six months,” Eyre stated. “We found no new symptomatic infections in any of the participants who had tested positive for antibodies.”

The research, a part of a serious employees testing programme, coated a 30-week interval between April and November 2020. Its outcomes haven’t peer-reviewed by different scientists however had been printed earlier than overview on the MedRxiv web site.

During the research, 89 of 11,052 employees with out antibodies developed a brand new an infection with signs, whereas not one of the 1,246 employees with antibodies developed a symptomatic an infection.

Staff with antibodies had been additionally much less prone to test positive for Covid-19 with out signs, the researchers stated, with 76 with out antibodies testing positive, in comparison with solely three with antibodies. Those three had been all effectively and didn’t develop Covid-19 signs, they added.

“We will continue to follow this cohort of staff carefully to see how long protection lasts and whether previous infection affects the severity of infection if people do get infected again,” Eyre stated.

(This story has been printed from a wire company feed with out modifications to the textual content. Only the headline has been modified.)

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