Q&A of the Day – Should those who’ve had COVID-19 get a vaccine?
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Today’s entry: Something I’ve not heard addressed is whether someone who’s had COVID-19 should get a vaccine. If those who already had it didn’t need a vaccine it’d help reach herd immunity a lot quicker.
Bottom Line: No doubt the silver lining to COVID infections is the ability to potentially reach herd immunity quicker...however as it pertains to vaccines...everyone, including those who’ve had the virus, are recommended to get vaccinated. According to the CDC: Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19. Even if you have already recovered from COVID-19, it is possible—although rare—that you could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 again. Experts are still learning more about how long vaccines protect against COVID-19 in real-world conditions. CDC will keep the public informed as new evidence becomes available.
That’s the challenge. The unknowns and when you consider we’re well over a year into the pandemic, it’s likely many who had COVID and recovered early on could be susceptible again – at least if the typical rules of flu viruses apply (which is still unclear) - especially with the wild card of the variants. To date there are 66 people who’ve recovered from COVID-19 only to become reinfected, two of which died. Of those 66 people, the average length of time from recovery to reinfection was 98 days. It’s believed variants are largely responsible for the reinfections. Some think that due to the variants we’ll never really achieve herd immunity. We won’t know until we get there but our own phycology probably works a little bit against us on this one. I think we tend to view this pandemic as one event as opposed to something dynamic.
It’s already well over a year. We know there’s a flu season with a different flu vaccine every year. If indeed COVID and its variants are the new seasonal flu, we may never really put COVID behind us. Last week my analysis projected Florida fully vaccinating those who want a vaccine sometime in July. If that roughly holds, we’ll wrap up vaccinations only about two months in advance of the start of the typical flu season. By then we’ll likely be talking about booster shots as part of a seasonal flu vaccine. That is if COVID-19 and its variants do essentially become the new seasonal flu. Another bridge we’ll cross when we get there.
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