If you've had your two COVID-19 vaccines, your booster, and even caught the virus itself, you may be wondering what your immune levels are now.
A total of 557,330 New Zealanders have officially caught COVID-19. Taking into account unreported cases, that number could be about 1.7 million, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told The Project on Wednesday night.
But if you've had both the booster and a COVID-19 infection, immunity may not last as long as people believe or want it to, immunologist Graham Le Gros says.
"You are [invincible] for about a month or two. What we don't know yet is how long the invincibility lasts for," he told The Project on Thursday.
"As an individual, you shouldn't take for granted that for the rest of your life, you don't have to worry about COVID-19."
But getting COVID-19 doesn't do a better job than getting the vaccine.
"One trouble with having just the natural infection, it'll only make you immune partially to that one kind of virus and we already know there's quite different versions of the COVID-19 virus: Delta, Alpha, Beta, and Omicron," Prof Le Gros says.
"One of the troubles with having a natural infection is you're really not resistant to the other viruses and you'll get infected with those ones, whereas the vaccine seems to be able to give a much broader immunity across all the variants."
This is one of the arguments of getting not only the first two vaccine doses but the booster too, Prof Le Gros says.
He says the booster is timed so that it's far enough away from your first two doses to stimulate your immune system to give a very high level of protection.
He believes eventually there'll be a vaccine that'll protect people from all different COVID-19 mutations.
"We've got a number of scientists here in New Zealand - of course, plenty overseas - working like crazy to make the next-generation vaccines that really can give a broad immunity across many different types of COVID-19 variants, even mix in RSV and the flu if possible," Prof Le Gros says.
"We've got to make a better vaccine that really can give a long-lasting, sterilising immunity that lasts for a decade."
He adds the job against COVID isn't done yet.
"This virus is going to be around New Zealand the world for another 50 years, so we've got to make a better vaccine to deal with this in a long-term way."
Watch his full interview above.
