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LONDON: People who have had COVID-19 are highly unlikely to contract it again for at least six months after their first infection, according to a British study of healthcare workers on the front lines of the fight against the pandemic in coronavirus.
The findings should offer some reassurance to the more than 51 million people around the world who have been infected with the pandemic disease, researchers from the University of Oxford said.
“This is really good news, because we can be sure that, at least in the short term, most people who get COVID-19 will not get it again,” said David Eyre, a professor in the Department of Population Health of Nuffield of Oxford. who co-directed the study.
Isolated cases of reinfection with COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, had raised concerns that immunity could be short-lived and that recovered patients could quickly fall ill again.
But the results of this study, conducted on a cohort of UK healthcare workers, who are among those most at risk of contracting COVID-19, suggest that cases of reinfection are likely to remain extremely rare.
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“Being infected with COVID-19 offers protection against re-infection for most people for at least six months,” Eyre said. “We found no new symptomatic infections in any of the participants who tested positive for antibodies.”
“It is very good news to see that we are seeing sustained levels of immune response in humans so far,” Mike Ryan, the WHO’s leading emergency expert, said at a news conference.
“It also gives us hope on the vaccine side.”
Maria van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID-19, said: “We still need to follow these people over a longer period of time to see how long immunity lasts.”
The study, which is part of a major staff testing program, covered a 30-week period from April to November 2020. Its results have not been reviewed by other scientists, but were published prior to review in the MedRxiv website.
During the study, 89 of the 11,052 employees without antibodies developed a new infection with symptoms, while none of the 1,246 employees with antibodies developed a symptomatic infection.
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Staff with antibodies were also less likely to test positive for COVID-19 without symptoms, the researchers said, and 76 without antibodies tested positive, compared to just three with antibodies. Those three were fine and did not develop COVID-19 symptoms, they added.
“We will continue to closely monitor this cohort of staff to see how long protection lasts and whether a previous infection affects the severity of the infection if people become infected again,” Eyre said.
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