The Virus Doesn’t Forgive or Forget: Each Reinfection Raises Long COVID Risk by 35%

You can live in the same country as a wildfire and still not smell smoke. That’s how Long COVID works for a lot of people. You don’t always see it, because it doesn’t always announce itself. People keep going. They patch their lives together. They choose silence at work so they can keep their jobs. Then a headline like this drops, and the first reaction you hear is the same one we’ve heard for years:

“If it were that common, I’d notice.”

That’s not how reality works.

Long COVID isn’t a flashing sign. It’s a slow leak. It robs a morning here, a workout there. It eats away at your energy, your attention span, your heart rate, your ability to function. Sometimes it’s manageable. Sometimes it’s crushing. And most people don’t vanish from public life when it happens. They just run their lives at half power and hope no one notices.

Meanwhile, there’s a whole cottage industry of minimizers. You know the script. A loud account compares Long COVID advocates to anti-vaxxers. He uses his lucky escape as evidence that it’s all in your head. One account once hosted a Twitter Space just to mock someone warning people that Long COVID isn’t rare.

That’s not science. That’s narcissism.

📊 This Study Should End the Debate

A new study from RTI International, tied to the NIH RECOVER program, looked at 424,616 adults with prior COVID-19 infections. Researchers compared people who got reinfected to people just like them who didn’t. It wasn’t a small sample. It wasn’t a fringe finding.

It found that getting COVID again raises your risk of Long COVID by 35%. Now to clarify, it’s not saying you now have a 35% risk. It’s taking your existing risk and increasing it by 35%. If you have a low risk, that 35% applies to that.

Not compared to your first infection. Compared to matched peers who didn’t get reinfected. That’s a big deal. It means that reinfection adds risk, not just temporarily, but for at least a year after.

Here’s what else the study showed:

• 11.1% of people who got reinfected developed Long COVID within a year

• Only 8.2% of those who weren’t reinfected developed it

• That’s a 3 percentage point jump, which is millions of people when scaled to a national level

• Risk increased with age, but younger adults weren’t spared

• Recent vaccination helped reduce risk, but didn’t eliminate it

So no, your immune system doesn’t “learn” how to avoid Long COVID just by getting infected a few times. This virus doesn’t forgive, and it sure as hell doesn’t forget.

🧠 But I Don’t See Long COVID Anywhere…

Here’s why the numbers feel unreal to some people: Long COVID is often invisible.

You’re not going to spot it unless you know what to look for. You’re not going to see someone struggling to breathe or remember words while they force themselves through a shift. You’re not going to hear about it from someone whose career quietly evaporated. You’ll just notice that people are gone more often. Or quieter. Or not the same.

Some people crash hard. Others hang on by a thread. That doesn’t make them less sick, just less obvious.

🎯 Why the Numbers Seem “All Over the Place”

Yes, you’ve seen different studies with different numbers. That’s because they’re asking different questions.

Some studies compare reinfection to a first infection, and find that risk is lower the second time. But others, like this one, compare reinfected people to those who were not reinfected at all, and the risk clearly goes up.

Different baselines = different answers. If you’re only reading headlines, it looks confusing. If you read the methods section, it makes perfect sense.

The real message isn’t mixed at all:

More infections = more risk.

That’s it.

💉 What About Vaccination?

The study also looked at vaccine timing. Here’s what they found:

• People vaccinated after their first infection but before reinfection had lower risk

• Those vaccinated only before the first infection had higher risk

• Those not vaccinated at all were among the worst off

• The effect wasn’t uniform across all groups, and more research is needed

Worth noting: older people were more likely to be vaccinated and more likely to have health issues, which pushes their total Long COVID numbers up. But even with that in mind, more recent vaccination seems to lower your odds.

Not erase them. Just lower them.

💬 So What Do We Do With This?

We stop using personal luck as public health logic. We stop pretending silence equals safety. We stop letting influencers with zero background in science set the tone for how we talk about a virus that’s reshaping people’s lives in slow motion.

And we stop telling people with Long COVID that they’re just anxious, or lazy, or dramatic.

They’re not exaggerating. They’re just surviving something you can’t see.

If you’ve made it this far without Long COVID, I’m genuinely glad for you. But don’t use that as evidence that it isn’t real. That’s not science. That’s survivor’s bias.

This virus has proven itself over and over. It breaks what it touches. It does not care that you’re done with it.

So don’t hand it another chance. Protect yourself. Protect the people around you. And quit pretending that reinfection is just part of life. What can you do? Wear a mask where you are able to, particularly in an indoor spaces.

Now this is anecdotal, but if you’re going to be vaccinated, at this point I would choose NovaVax. It seems to be less harsh and has a lower risk of adverse effects. I also have run into enough existing long Covid patients, who have had adverse reactions to vaccination, so work with your medical provider.

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📚 Sources and further reading

• CIDRAP news brief on the study and key numbers, University of Minnesota.

• medRxiv preprint from RTI International and RECOVER, reporting a 35 percent higher incidence among reinfected adults versus matched controls.

• Context on why estimates vary when comparing risk after reinfection versus first infection.