Nearly 60% of Americans have natural COVID-19 antibodies from prior infection - CDC
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Tuesday that three out of every five people in the U.S., including three out of four children now have antibodies from past COVID infections.
âThese findings illustrate a high infection rate for the Omicron variant, especially among children,â the agency said.
The percentage of people with natural COVID antibodies stood at ~58% in February, up from ~34% in December when the highly contagious variant started to dominate. The percentage of children and teenagers with COVID antibodies due to past infections have reached ~75%, up from about ~45% in December.
The CDC report was based on about 74,000 blood samples analyzed every month from September through January from a national commercial lab network. The sample size declined to ~46,000 in February.
CDC officials said that the study did not measure if the antibody levels generated from prior infection were strong enough to counter reinfections and severe illness.
However, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky noted that officials believe there is a high community level protection across the country due to the combination of vaccination, boosting and infection. She added that the vaccination was the safest method to achieve protection against the virus.
"Those who have detectable antibody from prior infection, we still continue to encourage them to get vaccinated," she said.
"We don't know when that infection was. We don't know whether that protection has waned. We don't know as much about that level of protection than we do about the protection we get from both vaccines and boosters."
The manufacturers of U.S. authorized COVID-19 vaccines: Pfizer (NYSE:PFE)/ BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX), Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA). Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ).
Read: Early this year, based on 2021 data CDC said that people infected with the Delta variant of COVID-19 had a slightly stronger immune response, compared to those who received only vaccines.