Can you catch Covid twice? Top scientist says risk is ‘low’ but admits as many as 10% of recovered patients could get the virus again as self-isolating Boris Johnson claims he’s ‘bursting with antibodies’
- Imperial College’s Danny Altmann said recovered patients ‘should not be blasé’
- Scientists have found ‘hard confirmed’ cases of people infected twice with Covid
- But they don’t agree on whether reinfections tend to be better or worse than first
- Prime Minister Boris Johnson is self-isolating after contact with infected MP
- The PM had Covid-19 in April and became so ill he ended up in intensive care
People who have already had Covid-19 ‘should not be blasé’ about the virus because as one in 10 people could catch it again, a top scientist has warned.
Professor Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, today said the rate of coronavirus reinfection is ‘quite a lot higher’ than data suggests.
His comments come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson goes into a fortnight of self-isolation after coming into close contact with an MP who later tested positive.
The PM, however, claims he is ‘bursting with antibodies’ after he ended up in intensive care during his own severe bout of Covid-19 in the country’s first wave.
Professor Altmann, however, said that although the risk of catching the disease again is ‘low’, it could happen to as many as one in 10 people and recovered patients should still take it very seriously.
Scientists have reported dozens of cases of coronavirus reinfection but the circumstances around them are often hazy, with it possible that some people never recovered from the first illness and others with dysfunctional immune systems.
The Imperial expert said there had been around 25 ‘hard confirmed cases’ in the world of people catching Covid-19 twice, but that researchers think it is far more common. Whether it is more or less serious, he said, is still a topic for debate.
Professor Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London, said people who have already had coronavirus ‘should not be blasé’ about the risk of catching it a second time
‘I read a lot about people saying one can’t be reinfected or there’s practically zero risk of reinfection,’ he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
‘That’s not quite true because, of 50million plus cases of infection in the world, we have more than 25 hard confirmed cases of reinfection, which you might say is negligible, but that’s because academically we set the bar quite high for defining reinfection.
‘You have to be SARS positive and then negative and then positive again and [with] different virus sequences and things.
‘Anecdotally, I think most of us think the rate of reinfection is quite a lot higher than that but not enormous.’