If you’ve tested positive for Covid-19 after the holidays – and with the highly contagious Ômicron variant in circulation – you may be wondering what your next steps should be.
Here are some tips of what the experts say you should know.
I tested positive, but I feel good. Should I still isolate?
The simple answer is to follow US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, said Graham Snyder, medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
“They based these guidelines on two years of observations about what it means to be contagious,” Snyder said.
The CDC’s guidance changed in the last few days of December. Now, people who test positive for Covid-19 must be isolated for five days. After that, if they don’t have symptoms or if the symptoms are going away – such as being without fever for 24 hours without taking fever-reducing drugs – they should continue with five days of mask use around other people.
The CDC says it is optional to have an antigen test on day 5. If it is positive, you should be isolated until day 10 (see the recommendations of the Brazilian Ministry of Health in the gallery below).
This should minimize the risk of spreading the virus. The likelihood of someone being contagious after 10 days is small if symptoms improve and the fever goes away, experts say.
“If you’ve had the infection and you’re feeling fine and several days have passed, chances are pretty good you’re not contagious,” said Myron Cohen, director of global health and infectious diseases at the UNC School of Medicine.
If you and the people around you wear masks, you’re taking proper precautions anyway, he said.
“You don’t know who in your universe is infectious,” Cohen said. Just because someone had Covid-19 five days ago doesn’t mean that person should be considered more dangerous. “And the person next to you who has never been tested is asymptomatic and has more copies [do vírus] than me? We should act as if we assume everyone has Covid.”
Am I less likely to have Covid-19 again now?
The infection provides some natural immunity to the coronavirus, but it’s not that simple. “We often talk about immunity to this virus as if it were a yes or no. You are either immune or not. But Mother Nature rarely operates like this”, said the expert.
The understanding of immunity is ongoing. Which means this could change over time. Covid-19 is not like chicken pox, for example. “With chickenpox, you’re not going to get the virus again, but that’s, you know, another level of immunity,” Cohen said.
Researcher David Wohl, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UNC School of Medicine, said your body will be able to fight the coronavirus better after an infection, but that doesn’t guarantee you can’t get the infection again.
“I wish you could say, once you get to Covid, you’ll never get to her again. This is not that kind of virus,” he said. “So we know that with the reinfection data, you’re not immune to the virus just because you’ve had a previous infection. There are some diseases that you only get once, but Covid-19 is one of those that, yes, you can get more than once.”
In some ways, a person can be “safer” after contracting Covid-19 because they are less likely to become seriously ill in a subsequent infection, said Sten Vermund, dean and professor of public health at the Yale School of Medicine. “They are also less likely to have a high viral load if they contract a subsequent infection. So, in that sense, they’re a little more secure.”
But experts recommend precautions. “I wouldn’t say anyone should feel comfortable, if they’ve had an infection, that they can run away feeling like they’re immune to reinfection or complications,” Snyder said. “Offers some protection. I wouldn’t trust her for 100% protection.”
At some point, Wohl said, this coronavirus may look more like the common cold — another coronavirus — and people will get it every few years, but it may not be that serious and there will be treatments that are easily accessible. But those days have not yet arrived.
Does getting sick from one variant protect against another?
After any Covid-19 illness, your body is usually able to detect the coronavirus.
“No matter which variant, your body is now better able to recognize the virus in the future. It’s stronger, it’s better prepared,” Snyder said. But exactly how prepared is not very clear.
The Delta and Ômicron variants were in circulation around the holiday season. Taking one of them can still leave you vulnerable to the other.
“The degree of cross protection of Delta and Ômicron is not very well known,” said Cohen. “It’s a complicated answer in general, but for a simplistic answer, the answer is, having a natural infection provides some immunity and probably provides some cross-immunity, but the magnitude of cross-immunity is not known.”
Last month, a small study looking at blood taken from people infected with Ômicron in South Africa showed that they have strong immune responses to Ômicron – but also boosted immune responses to the Delta variant, the researchers reported.
The study is limited and has not been peer-reviewed, and there is no certainty that it was the Ômicron infection that boosted the volunteers’ blood immunity, the researchers noted.
If Ômicron infection makes people less susceptible to Delta infections, that could be a good thing, the researchers noted. “In that case, the incidence of severe Covid-19 disease would be reduced and the infection could change to become less harmful to individuals and society,” wrote Alex Sigal and Khadija Khan of the African Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, in a report.
But remember, there’s no telling what other variants might come after these, or how different they might be from Delta or Ômicron.
What if I get sick but I haven’t been vaccinated or boosted? Do I still need to be vaccinated?
Experts say yes. With this particular coronavirus, your immune response is better with a vaccine than with a natural infection, Vermund said. It’s not entirely clear why.
Studies of Covid-19 reinfection show this to be true. Reinfection was more common in those who had natural immunity than in those who were vaccinated.
“The chances are much lower if you’ve been given a vaccine – not even boosted, just an initial regimen – of being reinfected compared to if you hadn’t been vaccinated and infected before,” Wohl said.
Wohl points to a September study by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services that documented about 11,000 reinfections. Of these, only 200 cases occurred in vaccinated people.
“We encourage anyone who’s ever had an infection to get vaccinated because vaccination helps the body prepare, producing a more robust set of antibodies,” Snyder said. “They bind more tightly and especially the boosts are amplified. They are able to recognize the differences in the virus.”
After vaccination, any reinfection would likely produce much less severe illness.
What if you got the booster and then you had Covid-19?
If you had an initial infection, your immune system is well prepared and ready to fight the coronavirus when it finds you again, Wohl said. Your body should be better prepared if you encounter Ômicron again, but there is no absolute guarantee that you will be protected if, for example, you walk into a crowd at a concert without wearing a mask.
“We are in the midst of emerging new waves. This is the worst time to be unmasked and close to other people’s noses and throats,” Wohl said.
Also, again, you cannot be sure that the virus you came into contact with will be the same variant that you caught earlier.
“The reason the person who had Covid and got the booster should still use common sense is because we still don’t understand what other variants are out there and how people will react to them,” Cohen said.
Can I have long Covid after Ômicron? Or could my kids have Pediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome?
The Ômicron variant is too new for experts to know anything about its long-term effects.
“We don’t know yet,” Snyder said. “It’s too early to know.”
Research has revealed that vaccination reduces the risk of long-term Covid-19 symptoms. And other studies say that the most serious effects of a complication of the infection, called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), resolve within six months.
This content was originally created in English.
original version
Reference: CNN Brasil
