CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Although precautions and vaccinations are in place, more people are finding themselves re-infected, regardless of vaccination status.
Pulmonologist Dr. Salim Surani said people taking precautions, like wearing a mask, is a good thing.
Dr. Surani told 3NEWS, "even as of yesterday, if you look at it, we had more than 100,000 people who had an infection. Even in Nueces County, it's almost 175 people who were infected, many of those were reinfection."
The challenge with the number of reinfection cases is that these can be an underestimation, because people have the option of at-home testing.
"I think people are recognizing that there is a higher incidence of infection, and a lot of the folks who have already received the vaccine, or they've had COVID in the past, they're getting the infection again," Dr. Surani shared.
The vaccine is doing its job to prevent serious illness and hospitalizations, but the vaccine immunity wears off after a certain amount of time. That may be the reason why people are seeing more reinfections lately. Boosters, along with vaccinations, are crucial.
"I think we have to go beyond that," Dr. Surani said. "We have to have a constant state of vigilance. In other words, if you see an increased number of cases in your community, then you need to make sure that you avoid large public gatherings."
Social distancing and hand washing are practices that we've been doing for the past few years. These precautions work hand-in-hand with vaccinations and boosters, like the vaccinations that were recently approved for those six-months and up.
"If you look at the bigger states like California and New York, they have more than 200 cases of reinfection," Dr. Surani said. "So the reinfection is going to happen, depending on your community prevalence or incidence of the disease. The higher number of cases that are in the community, the more chances you may get infected."
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