SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – As new COVID-19 variants emerge, health experts warn there's a higher possibility of reinfection, even if you had an omicron infection in December.
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Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KCBS Radio's "Ask An Expert" it is common for viral families to continually evolve until they become highly infectious.
"What we're seeing is BA.1 is pretty protective against any infection with the BA.2 group of omicron variant, but over time yes you're likely to be susceptible to be reinfected and that shouldn't be surprising," she said.
For those who had omicron early on, it is possible they may be vulnerable to a new infection in the coming months as BA.4, BA.5 and BA.2.12.1 become prevalent.
"People who have been infected sometime in the past probably several months — so people who were infected in December and January during the early omicron wave — may start to be susceptible to reinfection," Adalja estimated.
However, having a coronavirus infection could one day be similar to catching a cold, a new "normal." With each new subvariant strain, it may seem that COVID-19 is mutating at a higher rate than at the start of the pandemic, but Adalja said this is not the case.
"It's not necessarily that they're appearing more quickly, it's just the ability to detect them is getting much much better," she said. "A lot of variants have been spun off from the very beginning of this pandemic, most of them didn’t really have a major impact, but now we are attune to the risk of variants after we saw what delta and omicron have done."
To prepare for future strains, there is a concerted effort across the world to track new variants as early as possible. "We are going to see coronavirus continue to evolve and continue to develop new variants that are able to infect us," Adalja warned. "The goal is to make sure that the spectrum of illness is falling on the mild side. That's where vaccines, antivirals and monoclonal antibodies come into play."
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