How Long Can the Coronavirus Keep Reinfecting Us?

When the original Omicron variant swept across the country this winter, it launched America into a new COVID era, one in which nearly everyone—95 percent of adults, according to one CDC estimate—has some immunity to the virus through vaccines, infection, or both. Since then, however, Omicron subvariants have still managed to cause big waves of infection. They’ve accomplished this by eroding our existing immunity.

This will . “There’s not a lot of things I’m confident about in SARS-CoV-2 evolution, but I think I’m extremely confident we’ll keep seeing new variants that are progressively eroding antibody neutralization,” says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Experts are cautiously optimistic that the pace of variant emergence will eventually slow, and for many people, reinfections are already milder and hospitals are not overwhelmed. But