Is it dangerous to keep getting COVID-19?

BY NOW, MANY PEOPLE HAVE HAD COVID-19 NOT JUST once, but two, three, or even more times, making it much less scary and more common than it was three years ago. Often, repeat infections aren't as severe as they were the first time, leading to a sense of complacency about getting COVID-19 again and again.

- ALICE PARK

But reinfections aren't harmless, according to the latest studies. "There is some early evidence show[ing] that if you had COVID-19, there can be all sorts of problems after getting infected" and reinfected, says Dr. Robert Murphy, professor of medicine and executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. "We are just at the beginning of learning about them." 

Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, studies Long COVID, a condition marked by health effects that linger after infection. "Reinfection remains consequential," he says. In a paper published in Nature Medicine in 2022, he found that people who had gotten COVID-19 at least twice experienced higher rates of short- and long-term health effects, including heart, lung, and brain issues, compared with those who were infected only once.