Your questions, answered "Should a person in their early 30s who had a mild case of covid-19 and recovered fairly rapidly still get vaccinated, and does he or she need both shots?" — Paula in Michigan To answer the first part of your question — whether an individual in this scenario should get vaccinated — you bet. Although it is true that younger people may have more robust immune systems than older people, federal health authorities still recommend that eligible individuals get fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, despite their age or the severity of any prior infection from the coronavirus. Experts say a primary reason why nearly everyone should get vaccinated is because of the current rise in cases from the highly contagious delta variant, now the dominant strain in many parts of the United States. "We are coming up against variants right now that may be evading the immune response to different degrees, and having additional protection from the vaccine will provide more robust protection," said Lana Dbeibo, an infectious-diseases physician at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Indeed, research from Public Health England showed one shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech was 33 percent effective against symptomatic infection from the delta variant. Two shots, however, were 88 percent effective against symptomatic infection. But it sounds like part of your query is whether prior infection may provide at least some of the protection you need. Even though there is emerging research showing low reinfection rates among people who have had the virus, particularly among younger people, "we actually don't know how robust the immune system is for different types of infection severity," Dbeibo explained. So, she said, researchers do not yet know whether a person who had a mild infection will have a strong enough immune response to protect against future infection, how long that protective immunity will last or whether it will be able to protect that person against various variants. So, should an individual in this scenario get both shots? Again, yes. It is worth noting that there is early evidence to suggest that people who have had covid-19 had a strong antibody response after only one dose of the messenger RNA vaccines. But as Dbeibo pointed out, it is not known whether that response will provide protective immunity against reinfection, particularly when talking about current or future variants. "We are not ready to say younger people are protected with only one dose without studying it well," she said. | 
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