Is it dangerous to keep getting covid-19?

GOOD QUESTION

BY NOW, MANY PEOPLE HAVE HAD COVID-19 NOT JUST once, but two, three, or even more times, making it much less scary and more common than it was three years ago. Often, repeat infections aren’t as severe as they were the first time, leading to a sense of complacency about getting COVID-19 again and again.

But reinfections aren’t harmless, according to the latest studies. “There is some early evidence show[ing] that if you had COVID-19, there can be all sorts of problems after getting infected” and reinfected, says Dr. Robert Murphy, professor of medicine and executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “We are just at the beginning of learning about them.”

Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, studies Long COVID, a condition marked by health effects that linger after infection. “Reinfection remains consequential,” he says. In a paper published in Nature Medicinein 2022, he found that people who had gotten COVID-19 at least twice experienced higher rates of short- and long-term health effects, including heart, lung, and brain issues, compared with those who were infected only once.

But why? Dr. Davey Smith, a virologist and head of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Diego, says that certain characteristics—such as older age—may make people more vulnerable to complications after repeat bouts. Underlying health conditions that people may not necessarily be aware of—like prediabetes or increased inflammation—could also put them at higher risk after each infection.

“For somebody who is already on the edge of developing diabetes and then gets COVID-19, that could damage the pancreas and the endocrine system enough to change things,” Smith says. Similarly, having high rates of inflammation before COVID-19 could raise the risk of heart events such as stroke or heart attack after an infection.

Regardless of a person’s health status, each COVID-19 infection can raise the risk of developing blood clots, which can travel to the brain or lungs. That’s why Smith believes anyone who is eligible for antiviral drugs like Paxlovid should take them, since contr