“The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated subjects, previously infected subjects who were vaccinated, and previously uninfected subjects who were vaccinated, compared with a steady increase in cumulative incidence among previously uninfected subjects who remained unvaccinated.
Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.”
Why is it that so many people seem to be biased against evidence that our immune systems do a pretty good job? It's as if they want the vaccine to be the only thing that helps stop COVID.
But really, I think many people are laser focused on not just minimizing risk of COVID, but now trying to zero out COVID risk, that having any reason to delay receipt of a vaccine isn't a pre-existing medical condition is considered a form of aggression.
At some point we transitioned from "bend the curve" to "eradicate the virus", and this seems like a byproduct of that mental shift.
Good science tests assumptions. Even if the result often ends up unsurprising it is important to test assumptions as else we never find out which ones are wrong.
There were a number of cases of individuals being infected a second time after covid recovery. This article corroborates the evidence that individuals that had covid might have a low chance of reinfection and therefore might not need a vaccine. If you look at some other comments here you will see that still the evidence is not 100% clear cut, so good that data analysis continues in the future, e.g. to see if there are differences in how long the effect lasts between different kinds of vaccines and natural infection (there is also more than one way to have covid).
> It's as if they want the vaccine to be the only thing that helps stop COVID
Our immune system didn't evolve to cope with living in incredibly tight spaces surrounded by millions of people. Our immune system also isn't good at dealing with infections as we age: it's simply unnatural to survive past 70. We need to keep vaccinating, to create a collective immunity that protects the vulnerable.
They do a pretty good job, that's why we don't have a pandemic every year. But the fact that we have a pandemic now is clear evidence that it's not doing a good enough job.
Similarly, if you get a rabies infection you're going to die, even though you have an immune system.
Anecdotally: I know a number of people who say they "had COVID" but when you poke a little bit deeper it turns out they never had a formal diagnosis or test result -- they just self-diagnosed based on some symptoms. I have no data about the numbers here, but I suspect that these people make up a non-trivial percentage of the "already had COVID" crowd. Vaccination seems like a pretty good precaution for these folks.
I assumed that the fear was that lots of people who think they got covid but were never tested (or people who falsely tested negative) would use this as an excuse to not get the vaccine
I think many of us are so exhausted from fighting to get people to just sort of follow the rules. I’d rather just tell everyone to get the vaccine and leave no room for error here
This seems to be a US thing at least at the moment.
Here is Switzerland the government specifically says if you have had a positive Corona test you should not vaccinate for at least 6 month and if you do after that only 1 shot not 2.
Then again we had a vaccine shortage so that may also have something to do with it.
Because the issue has turned into a political and morality issue now.
In the US, over 40% of Democrats think that hospitalization rates for COVID are 50% or higher, and 28% of Democrats tink that hospitalization from COVID is 20-49%. It's really 1-5%.So the vast majority of Democrats think that COVID is over an order of magnitude worse than it actually is. So people who don't want to take the vaccine because they are concerned about taking a new medication or they already have been infected and don't need it, are now "immoral right wing Trumpists".
I read on the Bay Area subreddit how someone was called a 'Republican' for not wearing a mask outside, even though the mandate now is that you don't need to wear a mask outside if you're vaccinated and not in a large group of people.
Most authorities are downplaying natural immunity, despite evidence like this. The more widely this spreads, the more people will realize it's ok to rely on natural immunity, and to not blanket demonize those who are unvaccinated.
Because it's not public health policy anywhere that I'm aware of? But vaccine rollout would be way quicker, and 'positive test or vaccinated' proportion of populations would be way higher, and that would influence discussion of other aspects, like 'herd immunity' for example.
There were stories of reinfection happening. Also variants. Also, every covid study of every kind is getting an enormous amount of attention and resources
My brother-in-law who recovered from Covid was told that it actually put him at higher risk from a subsequent infection, and therefore taking the vaccine was even more important than if he had never had it. Every time someone with any prominence says, "I'm not getting vaccinated because I was already infected" there's a whole "well ackshually!" army that descends to insist that yes it's still SUPER IMPORTANT to get the shot. So I think your 99.99% number is overstating certainly the general public's level of knowledge on this question.
I did have covid (not diagnosed while active but shown in antibody test), and I got vaccinated significantly later. This was not driven by belief in medical need, but by social/rules need. You get no "points" for being recovered like you do for a proof of vaccination.
For the EU certificate, proof of prior infection can be used, although I believe you need a positive PCR test for that, an antibody test is not sufficient.
This is really good news. Whenever I see people talking about if previously infected people should be vaccinated, they always mention how we don't know how long protection lasts for previously infected people. This study includes this section:
Duration of protection
This study was not specifically designed to determine the duration of protection afforded by natural infection, but for the previously infected subjects the median duration since prior infection was 143 days (IQR 76 – 179 days), and no one had SARS-CoV-2 infection over the following five months, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 infection may provide protection against reinfection for 10 months or longer.
Most “previously infected” people were absolutely not infected at all. If this study involved self-reported previously infected and not confirmed PCR, the results would be very different.
One very important limitation is that this study does not take into account problematic variants such as P.1 and B.1.617
> Lastly, it is necessary to emphasize that these findings are based on the prevailing assortment of virus variants in the community during the study. It is not known how well these results will hold if or when some of the newer variants of concern become prominent.
Here in Brazil, I've heard news that the P.1 variant can cause reinfections but is still stopped by vaccines. This would point towards also vaccinating those who were already infected
How did the natural immunity path go for those 550k+ that died in the US? lol.
Obv everybody should've worn a mask. Everybody who hasn't had it should get vaccinated etc. Pretty much what the authorities have been saying the whole time.
Well, that's encouraging. Now we have data for about 5 months on that. About the same on vaccinated individuals. In a year, we'll know more about how long immunity lasts, and if and when booster shots will be needed.
What do you mean? Immunity of naturally infected individuals has been tracked far longer than five months, with both empirical evidence of lasting immunity along with obvious community evidence.
Do you know why the infection rate in San Francisco was so low? There was already a ton of natural immunity due to community spread. The majority of my office in downtown SF caught COVID in January 2020, which was confirmed by negative influenza A & B tests followed by positive antibody tests once they were made available.
What is particular disturbing to me is that, despite the fact that the CDC estimates total infections to be over a third of the U.S. population (and that estimate only accounts for February 2020 onward and doesn't include last two months), natural immunity is never, ever discussed by policy makers. Why? That's a massive amount of natural immunity that continues to be purposely ignored.
Like Panther34543, my wife and I were infected in December in Seattle 2019. My wife had to go to the hospital (Kaiser), where they told her they didn't know what it was.
After the symptoms were identified as "COVID", we knew what had happened. At this point, I assumed the infections were endemic and I had no idea if we could be re-infected. I went remote early on, as infections started to be tracked and we had stocked up on plastic gloves, toilet paper, masks etc. before many other people.
I suspect, a number of people know that this virus was always going to be around. I expect the situation was watched to see how to best manage the fact that every person on earth was going to get exposed, by community spread or vaccine.
I'm interested in the survival rate differences between the vaccinated and those infected through community spread. I suspect, it's not very different due to deaths in my family from the vaccinated who had access to every treatment (including plasma) through Kaiser, before passing. I also suspect it's more or less surviving the flu (tough for the elderly) + a particular genetic interaction, that makes you susceptible.
Here is one significant problem with this preprint:
"The health system never had a requirement for asymptomatic employee test screening. Most of the positive tests, therefore, would have been tests done to evaluate suspicious symptoms."
In other words, there could have been people who caught Covid-19, but because they had already had it, the symptoms were mild and they didn't get tested. It may be possible for these people to still be infectious (we don't really know this). For a proper study, they need to look at a decent population of people who have regular asymptomatic screening.
Maybe it's not necessary. It's my understanding there's different types of antibodies the body can create. I've already had Covid but I'm still taking the vaccine. My reasoning is that the vaccine offers a hack to ensure those specific antibodies are boosted that target the spike protein. I'm assuming it will further strengthen my immune system. Provide better protection against future variants.
the problem with live covid as the antigenic character is of course the mortality, and the morbidity risk.
there is also the instability of the spike protien in its natural form. when spike is cloven at it cleavage site it changes conformation, thus there are two faces available to the immune system; the default state, the cloven prefusion state. This makes a Naturally aquired immunity biased toward opsonizing antbodies.
the vaccine version of spike has been stabilized so as to remain in the default state resulting in a bias toward neutralizing antibodies.
so neutralizing antibodies bind to the viral spike at locations that interfere with receptor docking thus ideally preventing viral entry, while the immune system operates upon the many other viral epitopes, to produce a variant array of antibodies. This gives Tcell based [longterm] immunity.
the naturally aquired immunity involves Tcell activity upon infection, but that is the risk, as virus is capable of entering the cells before immune system begins to work against it.
this is why boosting is required beyond initial vaccine dose.
and this is why i believe it would be a good idea to take a vaccine along with naturally aquired immunity due to recovery, and you can have the best of both worlds, while not relying solely on naturally based immunity.
my theory is that the single dose vaccines and getting infected are about the same effectiveness as a single dose of the two dose vaccines.
If you are infected, you probably have about 85% resistance to infection. Getting an addition shot of moderna, pfizer, J&J is pretty much like getting a booster and gets you to 95%.
well pack it up boys, lets not make this go viral on social media and just hope the "peers" organically pick this study to review over the next 6 months instead of some other study that appears to be more in the public interest and has more popular people behind it
a while back I looked to see how long it actually took for the peer reviewed studies to come out for previous diseases and outbreaks, such as SARS 1. It was too long and we have to weigh inputs right now and react now.
[+] [-] reducesuffering|4 years ago|reply
“The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated subjects, previously infected subjects who were vaccinated, and previously uninfected subjects who were vaccinated, compared with a steady increase in cumulative incidence among previously uninfected subjects who remained unvaccinated.
Not one of the 1359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.”
[+] [-] daenz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdolan|4 years ago|reply
But really, I think many people are laser focused on not just minimizing risk of COVID, but now trying to zero out COVID risk, that having any reason to delay receipt of a vaccine isn't a pre-existing medical condition is considered a form of aggression.
At some point we transitioned from "bend the curve" to "eradicate the virus", and this seems like a byproduct of that mental shift.
[+] [-] estaseuropano|4 years ago|reply
There were a number of cases of individuals being infected a second time after covid recovery. This article corroborates the evidence that individuals that had covid might have a low chance of reinfection and therefore might not need a vaccine. If you look at some other comments here you will see that still the evidence is not 100% clear cut, so good that data analysis continues in the future, e.g. to see if there are differences in how long the effect lasts between different kinds of vaccines and natural infection (there is also more than one way to have covid).
[+] [-] ceejayoz|4 years ago|reply
It's also good to help them along sometimes.
[+] [-] f6v|4 years ago|reply
Our immune system didn't evolve to cope with living in incredibly tight spaces surrounded by millions of people. Our immune system also isn't good at dealing with infections as we age: it's simply unnatural to survive past 70. We need to keep vaccinating, to create a collective immunity that protects the vulnerable.
[+] [-] astrange|4 years ago|reply
Similarly, if you get a rabies infection you're going to die, even though you have an immune system.
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalleboo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FearlessNebula|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
Here is Switzerland the government specifically says if you have had a positive Corona test you should not vaccinate for at least 6 month and if you do after that only 1 shot not 2.
Then again we had a vaccine shortage so that may also have something to do with it.
[+] [-] ping_pong|4 years ago|reply
In the US, over 40% of Democrats think that hospitalization rates for COVID are 50% or higher, and 28% of Democrats tink that hospitalization from COVID is 20-49%. It's really 1-5%.So the vast majority of Democrats think that COVID is over an order of magnitude worse than it actually is. So people who don't want to take the vaccine because they are concerned about taking a new medication or they already have been infected and don't need it, are now "immoral right wing Trumpists".
I read on the Bay Area subreddit how someone was called a 'Republican' for not wearing a mask outside, even though the mandate now is that you don't need to wear a mask outside if you're vaccinated and not in a large group of people.
[+] [-] epgui|4 years ago|reply
-- biochemist
[+] [-] briefcomment|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cuchoi|4 years ago|reply
Anecdotal data: my wife and I got COVID twice 9 months apart last year. The second time my wife ended up in the hospital.
[+] [-] rriepe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bregma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psychlops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] void_mint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickspencer3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] symlinkk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewBissell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] np_tedious|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bvinc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alok-g|4 years ago|reply
Had COVID? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9
[+] [-] jquery|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufo|4 years ago|reply
> Lastly, it is necessary to emphasize that these findings are based on the prevailing assortment of virus variants in the community during the study. It is not known how well these results will hold if or when some of the newer variants of concern become prominent.
Here in Brazil, I've heard news that the P.1 variant can cause reinfections but is still stopped by vaccines. This would point towards also vaccinating those who were already infected
https://jornal.usp.br/ciencias/primeira-dose-da-coronavac-e-...
[+] [-] whiddershins|4 years ago|reply
It’s odd that the public health messaging seems to have always been worst-case-least-likely scenario until we can prove differently.
[+] [-] randomopining|4 years ago|reply
Obv everybody should've worn a mask. Everybody who hasn't had it should get vaccinated etc. Pretty much what the authorities have been saying the whole time.
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Panther34543|4 years ago|reply
What do you mean? Immunity of naturally infected individuals has been tracked far longer than five months, with both empirical evidence of lasting immunity along with obvious community evidence.
Do you know why the infection rate in San Francisco was so low? There was already a ton of natural immunity due to community spread. The majority of my office in downtown SF caught COVID in January 2020, which was confirmed by negative influenza A & B tests followed by positive antibody tests once they were made available.
What is particular disturbing to me is that, despite the fact that the CDC estimates total infections to be over a third of the U.S. population (and that estimate only accounts for February 2020 onward and doesn't include last two months), natural immunity is never, ever discussed by policy makers. Why? That's a massive amount of natural immunity that continues to be purposely ignored.
[+] [-] Supermancho|4 years ago|reply
After the symptoms were identified as "COVID", we knew what had happened. At this point, I assumed the infections were endemic and I had no idea if we could be re-infected. I went remote early on, as infections started to be tracked and we had stocked up on plastic gloves, toilet paper, masks etc. before many other people.
I suspect, a number of people know that this virus was always going to be around. I expect the situation was watched to see how to best manage the fact that every person on earth was going to get exposed, by community spread or vaccine.
I'm interested in the survival rate differences between the vaccinated and those infected through community spread. I suspect, it's not very different due to deaths in my family from the vaccinated who had access to every treatment (including plasma) through Kaiser, before passing. I also suspect it's more or less surviving the flu (tough for the elderly) + a particular genetic interaction, that makes you susceptible.
[+] [-] mnw21cam|4 years ago|reply
"The health system never had a requirement for asymptomatic employee test screening. Most of the positive tests, therefore, would have been tests done to evaluate suspicious symptoms."
In other words, there could have been people who caught Covid-19, but because they had already had it, the symptoms were mild and they didn't get tested. It may be possible for these people to still be infectious (we don't really know this). For a proper study, they need to look at a decent population of people who have regular asymptomatic screening.
[+] [-] bartimus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolph|4 years ago|reply
there is also the instability of the spike protien in its natural form. when spike is cloven at it cleavage site it changes conformation, thus there are two faces available to the immune system; the default state, the cloven prefusion state. This makes a Naturally aquired immunity biased toward opsonizing antbodies.
the vaccine version of spike has been stabilized so as to remain in the default state resulting in a bias toward neutralizing antibodies.
so neutralizing antibodies bind to the viral spike at locations that interfere with receptor docking thus ideally preventing viral entry, while the immune system operates upon the many other viral epitopes, to produce a variant array of antibodies. This gives Tcell based [longterm] immunity.
the naturally aquired immunity involves Tcell activity upon infection, but that is the risk, as virus is capable of entering the cells before immune system begins to work against it.
this is why boosting is required beyond initial vaccine dose.
and this is why i believe it would be a good idea to take a vaccine along with naturally aquired immunity due to recovery, and you can have the best of both worlds, while not relying solely on naturally based immunity.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] refracture|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achenatx|4 years ago|reply
If you are infected, you probably have about 85% resistance to infection. Getting an addition shot of moderna, pfizer, J&J is pretty much like getting a booster and gets you to 95%.
[+] [-] paedubucher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trimbo|4 years ago|reply
Preprint, non-peer reviewed.
[+] [-] neilwilson|4 years ago|reply
We need replication.
If anything has shown up the weakness in science over the last few years it is this veneration of peer review. It ain't working that well any more.
[+] [-] vmception|4 years ago|reply
a while back I looked to see how long it actually took for the peer reviewed studies to come out for previous diseases and outbreaks, such as SARS 1. It was too long and we have to weigh inputs right now and react now.
[+] [-] TchoBeer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolph|4 years ago|reply
This is about vaccination not providing any further benefit to those who have recovered and cleared from covid.
this is ^not^ saying you need to be vaccinated even if you have gone through covid
[+] [-] LockDownExposed|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] LockDownExposed|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]