The COVID-19 Reinfection Loop and What It Means for Americans’ Health

More Americans are catching the coronavirus for the second, third or even fourth time. And each time someone contracts COVID-19, they are rolling the dice on whether they will come down with serious health issues.

It’s a reinfection loop that is seizing the country with no immediate end in sight, and it is driven by a coronavirus variant scene that continues to quickly change.

The majority of Americans have had COVID-19 at some point in time, according to estimatesfrom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But with more than 120,000 new infections reported on average each day – a number that is sure to be a significant undercount as many rely on at-home tests – the pool of Americans who haven’t gotten COVID-19 is getting smaller while the number of Americans who are getting reinfected grows.

Of course, COVID-19 reinfection wouldn’t be a major issue if it did not come with additional health risks. But that isn’t the case.

Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, says he decided to study reinfections after more of his patients started reporting getting COVID-19 again, and he wondered if getting reinfected adds any adverse health risks.

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“The answer is absolutely, absolutely yes,” says Al-Aly, who is also the chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. “People need to really be aware that if they’ve previously been infected, it's still worth it to protect themselves from or to reduce the risk of getting reinfected.”

In a recent study, which hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, Al-Aly and other researchers found that people who had been reinfected had a greater chance of death, hospitalization, lung and heart problems, diabetes, fatigue, digestive and kidney disorders and mental health issues within six months of their last infection than those who had been infected once.

“Even if you've had it, having it again is certainly no cakewalk and absolutely adds risk,” Al-Aly says.

The study, which authors said was the first to characterize the health risks of COVID-19 reinfection to their knowledge, looked at health records from 250,000 veterans who had one COVID-19 infection and nearly 39,000 people who had one or more reinfection.