AMA: What doctors wish patients knew about COVID-19 reinfection (USA)

While I think avoiding getting covid-19 is a very good idea, there may be some 'correlation is causation' thinking here.

People who are very healthy may be more likely to have asymptomatic or very mild infections and so not even know they have been infected. So, when you look at Healthy person A, they report, and their health records report, that they have only been infected once. Unhealthy person B, already with kidney disease, is more likely to be more unwell and have a record of their infection. And, being more unwell, there is a greater risk of complications from the infection.

People who actually do have more infections than others are probably, on average, different to those who don't. It may be that they are working in low paid work with poor conditions (e.g. no protective equipment), or that they are working multiple public facing jobs (e.g. uber driver as a second job). They might live in a care home, or an institution of some sort. So, they are more likely to be old, be poor, have a poor diet, have existing medical conditions resulting from that poverty including substance abuse and have poor access to medical care. Therefore, it's not surprising that people who have more infections than others also tend to have worse health outcomes in general.

The studies may have accounted for some of those factors e.g. age, but I doubt that they accounted for them all.

 

My country's Long Covid guidelines note that there is no consensus as to whether ME/CFS is associated with Long Covid.