Since the start of the pandemic, researchers in the large COMMUNITY project at Danderyd Hospital have examined immunity after covid-19 infection and after vaccination.
In the sixth sub-study, 375 hospital staff were PCR-tested regularly for four weeks regardless of symptoms.
Although participants had recently received the third vaccine, more than one in five tested positive within two months.
Most had no symptoms at the time of sampling.
- Omikron gets past the antibodies.
We see that those who become infected had as high levels of antibodies as those who did not become infected, says Charlotte Thålin, assistant.
chief physician and the study's research leader.
Infectious for 9 days
By testing the infected participants every other day, the researchers were able to monitor virus levels over time.
Over half of the participants were positive for 11 days.
The tests also indicate that they were contagious for up to nine days.
- This is the first time that it has been possible to follow the virus levels in the airways during an ongoing micron infection and it was surprising that so many were positive for so long and had such high virus levels even though they had just received their third dose, says Charlotte Thålin.
If so many people get infected even though they have been given three doses, is it really worth vaccinating people then?
- The vaccine still protects against serious illness and omicron can be a dangerous virus for the unvaccinated.
and for the elderly and risk groups, says Charlotte Thålin and adds:
- And in a larger perspective, we want to reduce the spread of infection because the higher the spread of infection is in a well-vaccinated population, the greater the risk that we get new mutations and new virus variants.