Until early 2022, you had to be pretty unlucky to have had COVID more than once. Reinfections did occur on occasion, of course, but the phenomenon remained relatively rare.
Posted at 2:23 p.m.
Except that in recent months, with the arrival of Omicron and its sub-variants which easily escape antibodies adapted to the previous variants, reinfections are becoming the norm. And the scientific community is wondering: does SARS-CoV-2 get milder and milder as we catch up with it, or does each reinfection add an additional risk of long-term complications?
The latest data available on reinfections in Quebec unfortunately dates back to the end of 2021, but we can get an idea of how much more frequent it has become by looking at the case of England. There, at 1er January 2021 (7-day average), there were 94 reinfections out of 56,000 confirmed COVID cases, or less than 0.17% of the total. At 1er January this year, reinfections accounted for almost 10% of all cases. And as of July 5, the date of the last complete data available, this proportion had exceeded 22%, or 5,600 reinfections out of 25,000 cases.