According to this article there are now three large scale studies analyzing covid risk, and they all indicate that your risk of negative health consequences goes up every infection.
While this risk starts (relatively) low for most of us, particularly those vaccinated and in younger people or children, there are concerning signs it may not stay low. If each new invasion of our bodies allows this insidious virus a greater chance to cause damage, such small risks will eventually add up to a big one.
Even if you only experience the symptom of the initial infection mildly.
"Each subsequent COVID infection will increase your risk of developing chronic health issues like diabetes, kidney disease, organ failure and even mental health problems," physician Rambod Rouhbakhsh warned journalist Sara Berg in an American Medical Association podcast earlier this year.
"This dispels the myth that repeated brushes with the virus are mild and you don't have to worry about it. It is akin to playing Russian roulette."
Long COVID is defined as a multisystem disease that have a devastating effect on any organ system, with potentially lifelong consequences. Rates of long COVID among people who have contracted SARS-CoV-2 vary controversially between studies and regions, from about 10 percent to a staggering 50 percent of people who've had the virus reported as having long term symptoms.
We are basically ignoring the risks and hoping for a science miracle to save us before things get too bad. Same approach we are taking with global warming. What an interesting time to be alive.
There's been a lot of quibbling about what long covid is recently, because so many people are having long term health problems following an infection. The WHO says it's about a 1 in 10 chance every infection. Recently the German health minister stated the risk was 3% per infection. If the German health minister is right, that's approximately the same chance of rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice. Every infection.
How many infections you get will depend on what variants you are exposed to, how much of it you were exposed to, the timing between exposures, and if you were vaccinated within the last few months. It's a combination of all those factors and how your body responds to them, which can vary significantly between people. It's safe to say at least once a year, probably twice a year now that almost nobody is trying to prevent infections, and three times a year if you are unlucky.
So best case you roll the dice once a year. Worst case three times a year.
Basically, everytime covid enters the bloodstream, it's down to luck as to wether or not our immune system responds before it does a bunch of damage to our body, and by not doing anything to prevent the spread of the virus outside of vaccines and prior immunity, we are selecting for variants of the virus that are best able to evade the immune system. In other words: The only evoluntionary pressure it's facing is to get around the immune system, and it has billions of hosts a year to train on. I believe we have seen the same mutations that make it easier for it to evade an immune response develop in different variants several times at this point. This situation is unique in modern history, and no one really knows how it will play out.
We are already seeing disability rates go up so much in the US and UK that they are preparing to redefine disability to exclude more and more people, so that's a bad sign.