Welcome to the Great Reinfection
If you’re unfortunate enough to have had an intimate encounter with the dreaded Sars-CoV-2 virus, I’m afraid your dalliance with it might not have been your last. Get ready for round two (and three, and maybe four—maybe ad infinitum). Welcome to the Great Reinfection.
In the early months of the pandemic, reinfections were a remarkable rarity, even making global news when discovered. “When the pandemic first started, everybody assumed that once you got it, you were done,” says Juliet Pulliam, director of the South African DSI-NRF Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University.
Two years and some change in, that novelty has largely evaporated. A perfect storm of waning immunity, loosened restrictions, and an extremely transmissible variant making the rounds has meant reinfections are the new normal for many. But even setting aside these factors, it makes sense that there are now more reinfections than ever. At this stage of the pandemic, repeat infections would always have been more common than before, owing to the sheer number of people who’ve had Covid-19. You can’t get reinfected unless you’ve already been infected in the first place.
