Pennsylvania to begin counting covid reinfections

Thousands of new covid-19 cases could appear in the state Department of Health’s Monday report as Pennsylvania begins counting reinfections, officials said.

For the past 19 months, state health officials have counted only one case per infected person, even if that individual contracted the virus again at some later time.

Changing national guidelines means the state will begin counting reinfections that meet certain criteria. Under the revised case definition, officials said in a release, any individual who tests positive more than once at least 90 days apart will be counted as a new case.

The Department of Health already has the data, and so reinfection cases are being reindexed to meet the new guidelines.

That reindexing already has begun for Philadelphia, where there have been 1,667 reinfections among people who have had covid at least once. Reinfection cases for the other 66 counties will be revised Monday, meaning those cases will be added to Monday’s new case report. As a result, it’s likely that Monday’s new case report will appear abnormally high.

The changes will help paint a more accurate picture of what people are calling natural immunity, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease and critical care expert.

“To count additional infections, 90 days must have passed between infections, so this is capturing a real phenomenon of reinfection and helps to understand the duration of immunity,” he said.

The latest analysis of research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that prior covid infections don’t protect people as well as vaccination when it comes to reinfection.

The data was collected from more than 7,000 adults hospitalized with covid-like symptoms, according to Fox News.

Researchers sought to compare the odds of testing positive for the virus among those who were unvaccinated and previously had the virus at least 90 days prior versus people who had been fully vaccinated for at least 90 days and had not previously tested positive.

The data showed 8.7% of people in the unvaccinated-but-previously-ill group tested positive for the virus again as opposed to 5.1% of those in the vaccinated-and-not-previously-ill group, the network reported.

Researchers concluded the “vaccine-induced immunity was more protective than infection-induced immunity against laboratory-confirmed covid-19.”

Including those reinfection cases from Philadelphia, the state tallied 5,269 newly reported cases Wednesday, for a running pandemic-long total of more than 1.6 million. More than 2,600 people were hospitalized across the state with the virus, with nearly 600 in intensive care.

Statewide, 31,261 people have died from covid-19 through Thursday’s data.