It’s not the “herd immunity” health officials touted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (which turned out to be a mirage, anyway), but it’s something.
More than half of Americans (52%) say they have contracted the virus, according to a new Monmouth University poll. That number has jumped from just seven weeks ago, when 40% said they’d had it. The numbers, though, are not concrete. “[A] little more than 4 in 10 say they’ve tested positive for or been diagnosed with covid-19, while 10 percent say they haven’t been diagnosed but know they’ve had the virus,” The Washington Post reported.
“This appears to be the first poll to show a majority of Americans saying they’ve been infected at some point. An August poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 30 percent had tested positive or were ‘pretty sure’ they’d contracted the virus. A year earlier, in August 2020, that number was 14 percent,” the Post said.
Not surprisingly, more Republicans than Democrats say they have contracted the virus.
“Some 57 percent of Republicans say they’ve contracted the virus, compared with 38 percent of Democrats. Back in January, those numbers were 50 percent and 28 percent, respectively,” the liberal newspaper said. “This tracks with polls that more narrowly surveyed self-reported positive tests. It also suggests the gap has grown since the pandemic began.”
Getting COVID-19 is never good, but a study in December has found that if you were already fully vaccinated, you might just turn into Superman.
Breakthrough cases — catching the virus despite being immunized — became common as virus variants Delta and Omicron moved across the nation, but researchers from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) found that such cases lead to “super immunity” to future SARS-CoV-2 variants.
“You can’t get a better immune response than this,” says senior author Fikadu Tafesse, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology in the OHSU School of Medicine, in a university release. “These vaccines are very effective against severe disease. Our study suggests that individuals who are vaccinated and then exposed to a breakthrough infection have super immunity.”
The study found that “antibodies measured in blood samples of breakthrough cases were both more abundant and much more effective – as much as 1,000% more effective – than antibodies generated two weeks following the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. The study suggests each exposure following vaccination actually serves to strengthen immune response to subsequent exposures even to new variants of the virus,” OHSU said in its release.
Tafesse said the level of immunity is “sometimes up to 2,000 percent, so it’s really high immunity.”
“I think this speaks to an eventual end game,” said study co-author Marcel Curlin, M.D., associate professor of infectious diseases in the OHSU School of Medicine. “It doesn’t mean we’re at the end of the pandemic, but it points to where we’re likely to land: Once you’re vaccinated and then exposed to the virus, you’re probably going to be reasonably well-protected from future variants.”
“Our study implies that the long-term outcome is going to be a tapering-off of the severity of the worldwide epidemic,” he said.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.
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Source: Dailywire
