22-10-2020
BiggBoss 14

It's important to take proper Post COVID care to avoid risk of reinfection.After recent cases of COVID-19 reinfection being documented across India and the world, it's evident that safeguarding ourselves against COVID-19 might be an ongoing battle, at least until we get a vaccine. Even though COVID recovered patients do gain antibodies post-infection, we do not really know how long they last. In fact, failing to take simple preventive steps can further increase your risk. Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has also warned people to be careful and not take the recovery lightly.

Even though there exists only little clinical evidence about people catching COVID-19 again, scientists suggest that there can be multiple meanings of what reinfection could mean, making us understand as to why this could happen. A probable reason for this could be the fact that once a person recovers from the infection, the viral load in the body depletes. In some cases, a recovered patient could go on to have low levels of virus in the body and hence, make them prone to show symptoms and get reinfected.

Secondly, even if antibodies do develop, they may not provide lifelong immunity. Studies have emerged which suggest that antibodies can start to wane in a recovered patient anywhere between 3-9 weeks post recovery. ICMR takes 100 days as the cut off time, post which, antibody count starts to deplete to the lowest. In fact, it can also happen that not all COVID recovered patients develop the same number of antibodies. Milder the infection, lesser could be the body's antibody response. Hence, it's super important to keep yourself guarded and follow the same number of precautions, as you did before.