COVID reinfections rising in the US

The number of COVID-19 reinfections has been rising in the US as the new Omicron subvariant BA.5 has emerged, according to The Washington Post website.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just over 100,000 new cases a day on average have been reported in the past weeks.

However, Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research, said the number is wildly underestimated, and the true number could be as many as a million. He said it is "the worst version of the virus that we've seen" because only limited protection against BA.5 can be conferred by antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections.

More than 1.6 million cases of reinfection have been reported across 24 states since data collection began, according to an ABC analysis and compilation of state provided data. New York, Maine and California have all reported over 200,000 reinfections each, while Michigan and North Carolina have both confirmed over 100,000 individually.

There is an increasing number of people who had been reinfected twice, with some people facing reinfection three, four and on rare occasions five times.

"I believe that virtually everyone will be infected at some point in their lives, and most people multiple times. We see plenty of patients with reinfection, though it is a really hard number to quantify," said Dr. Shira Doron, an infectious disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center.