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Can You Get COVID More Than Once?
How about from the same variant?
Understanding how the immune system works, and how variants of a virus come about, leads us to the answer – YES. You can contract the same variant more than once, and you can contract different variants as well. Hypothetically, you could actually get more than one variant at the same time.
People are still confused about what natural immunity is and what vaccinations accomplish. In both of these, the result is to help your immune system recognize an antigen, in this case the virus, and be prepared to fight it.
An analogy might be something like this: Someone throws something at you when you don’t expect it and it hits you in the face. The next time they throw something you are prepared and raise your hand to stop it. It still hits you, but only in the hand. You managed to stop it before it got to your face.
When you catch a disease, like COVID, your immune system develops an awareness so when mother nature throws it at you again, you can raise your defenses and protect yourself.
The same applies to a vaccine, but with a vaccine you’re only exposes to nonfunctional pieces of the disease so it doesn’t affect you very much anyway. It sensitizes the body to beware of the disease, and when the body is exposed against, the defenses go up, limiting the amount of damage.
In the case of a flu shot, you may actually feel a little sick one day, or maybe even a lot sick, but the symptoms dissipate more quickly and you never get that whole week of horrible flu symptoms. This also means that your likelihood of spreading it to someone else is considerably less – and I mean by a lot.
The CDC, NIH and White House Task Force did a terrible job of communicating these things to the public and changed their tune every other week so there is no wonder the confusion exists.
Many people got the impression that being vaccinated or surviving the disease meant they couldn’t get the virus at all, which is untrue. Data on any virus or disease shows that people still get it, it just a lot easier to get over it.
And, it should be understood that getting it is a lot harder, and transmitting it is a lot less likely too, but you can still get it. People who have had it, or have been vaccinated, are a lot less likely to get it [again], and a lot less likely to spread it.