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When the pandemic began COVID-19 and there was not much information about the disease, it was believed that after having contracted it there was less chance of relapse but as time went by that little hope faded.
The problem with the virus that causes COVID is that “its structure can mutate enough so that the immune system cannot recognize it as something it was exposed to in the past,” explains intensive care doctor Abhijit Duggal in an article by Cleveland Clinic.
That is a person can contract the disease as many times as their body does not recognize the new variants And wow, the coronavirus has mutated! Currently there are not only variants but subvariants that are causing an uptick in infections in different parts of the world.
And it is that people who have defeated COVID in the past or have the necessary doses of vaccines can still relapse if their defenses fail to detect the new tenant. Even so, these two factors can protect from a more serious disease. Abhijit Duggal points out that in the people who have been infected before and they have the vaccines as well as with a strong immune systemCOVID tends to be less severe than the first time.
However, “the people who have weakened immune systems due to chronic illnesses, medications or other factors, may run a increased risk of more serious infectionseven in a second or third round.
How long do vaccines protect against COVID-19?
A team of experts, led by the Hospital General de Massachusetts (MGH)developed a mathematical model that allows calculating the protection and duration of reinforcements against the coronavirus.
According to the investigation, the current vaccines against COVID-19 they are effective in preventing it or limiting the severity of the disease in healthy people, but the effectiveness is less among patients with cancer or immunosuppression.
For this reason, experts developed a mathematical framework to predict how effective vaccine immunity is over time.
Among the results, the experts found that a booster dose of both mRNA vaccines – from the companies Pfizer and BioNTech or Moderna– can induce a robust enhancement of both antibody levels and the number of adaptive immune cell types, which is expected to provide sufficient protection for more than 1 year in healthy patients.
However, this mathematical model reveals that for the immunocompromised people or cancer patients receiving immunosuppressive treatment, the boosting effect may be diminished and they should receive more frequent boosters. This means that the effectiveness of the doses against COVID-19 is lower among these patients.
In the case of people who receive the vector vaccine of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen company, additional booster doses should be considered for all. The analysis also revealed that the optimal schedule for vaccine booster doses is not the same for all variants of the coronavirus.