All of the “breakthrough” stories I hear are about people who were vaccinated and then got COVID anyway.
Are there any documented cases of people who (vaccinated or not) already had COVID and then got COVID again?
Yes. Just like how vaccine-induced immunity fades over time, necessitating the use of booster shots, the immunity produced by natural infection also wanes unless a person is regularly exposed to the virus. The chances of reinfection are also increased when new variants like Delta and Omicron emerge.
You can also go into the 2020 or 2021 breaking news threads and search for the term “reinfect”, a lot of results pop up.
@JaneDoe42’s husband has posted about her husband, who was unvaccinated, got COVID, and later got the Delta variant. (He’s vaccinated now.) Maybe she’ll stop in and give you more details.
Two of my uncles and their wives got covid twice after they got their two shots. Unfortunately the shots were not Pfizer or Moderna. Do not know if that is what caused the breakthrough.
Why “unfortunately” ?
Pfizer and Moderna vaccines provides the highest level of immunity.
Not that we should get rid of the other ones - they still help, and some people who can’t take mRNA vaccines can tolerate the other ones. Some protection is better than none.
Two of my coworkers have had COVID twice. Once in April/May/June of 2020 and then again at some point in the last six months.
None are vaccinated and oddly enough (or maybe not) they are as certain that they can’t get it the third time as they were that they couldn’t get it the second time.
If you haven’t already, you might consider posting about this in the “Share your Covidiot stories” thread. Just a suggestion.
Thank you! My wife was particularly interested in people who got covid twice with no vaccinations.
Apparently, there are some people who think that the antibodies one gets from COVID are so powerful that getting a vaccine would weaken them. Therefore, as much as they were anti-vax before getting COVID, they are even more strongly anti-vax afterward.
I was looking for some anecdotal evidence against them, and I thank y’all for it.
Where they live only the Chinese vaccine was available.
OK, I’m not aware of the relative efectiveness of that.
ETA - to add “not”
Hubs caught delta almost exactly 6 weeks after recovering from his first case. Despite being fully vaccinated, I also tested positive for delta. Hubs was really sick for over three weeks the first time and over two weeks the second time. Happily, he didn’t end up in the hospital. I felt like I had a summer cold with a mild fever for a couple of days.
They must be related to hubs. When his stupid unvaccinated self caught COVID the first time, I put down a deposit on a $2600 kitten and told him that when he caught COVID again, that I was going to get another one. He was sure he couldn’t get it a second time and the price of Maine Coons went up a couple of hundred bucks. He tested positive and I put down a deposit on another kitten. He got jabbed and promised to get the second jab and any boosters if I would stop the new kitten deal.
tldr: the only reason hubs is vaccinated now is because we are too old for kittens.
This is the distinction, right? Breakthrough is the term only for the vaccinated, and reinfected is only for the previously infected.
Those are all English words, but I absolutely cannot comprehend that sentence.
Fitness and nutrition coach to the Denver Broncos, Bill Phillips, had quite the second case. Was in no hurry to get vaccinated because he was infected in early 2020.
Spent 47 days in the hospital and lost 70 lbs. At one point he was put into a medically induced coma and on a ventilator. Before and after photos are astounding.
He is now vaccinated…
That makes perfect sense. Thank you!
One complication in the statistics is that a lot of sick people don’t actually get tested. If you spent a few weeks with a cough and a fever in 2020 or 2021, well, it was probably covid. But if you then get get better, and some time later again get a cough and a fever, is that a reinfection? Or was one of those two actually the flu, or a bad cold, or whatever? Without knowing how common reinfection is, it’s tough to estimate the odds… but the reinfection rate is precisely what we’re trying to figure out.
Even better than anecdotal evidence is scientific studies. Those have shown that infection-acquired immunity plus vaccination is the most effective. Moreso than either of those alone. Vaccination first or infection first doesn’t matter. I don’t think there’s been a study yet that includes boosters, but there was evidence that infection-acquired plus vaccination-acquired immunity was more resistant to variants, which suggests that the exposure to the entire virus in addition to just the spike protein gives an advantage. (Which is obviously a consolation for having been infected, not a strategy.)
Here’s an article with a ton of useful information.
Thank you, eschrodinger. I just sat down to my pc to ask about this. From previous posts, we clearly DO have anecdotal cases of people who got reinfected. But now I’m shifting focus to the statistics, and I’m looking forward to reading that article. I’m looking (for example) to see comparisons between these 3 groups:
- People who got COVID even though they already had COVID before
- People who got COVID even though they got both doses of the vaccine
- People who had COVID and got vaccinated, and then got COVID again anyway
Of course, those statistics will be attenuated be details like the delay between those events, but at any rate, I’m interested in seeing what the statisticians have found so far. Gonna go read it now, and I’ll see y’all later on.
The Israeli data on infection-acquired vs vaccine-acquired immunity might be exaggerated because they were looking at people who’d been vaccinated 6 months or more earlier, whereas I’m not sure if all the previous infections were also at least 6 months out. But the data showing that having both infection and one dose of vaccine is better than either fully vaccinated or prior infected alone seems compelling.