Good news!

Vaccines strengthen your immune system

"When we looked in the setting of Covid disease, we found that people who had prior vaccinations with a variety of vaccines -- for pneumococcus, influenza, hepatitis and others -- appeared to have a lower risk of getting Covid disease," Dr. Andrew Badley, an infectious disease specialist at Mayo Clinic told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday night.

It's what immunologists call immune training: how your immune system creates an effective response to fight off infections, Badley says.

"A good analogy is to think of your immune system as being a muscle," he said. "The more you exercise that muscle, the stronger it will be when you need it."

Masks reduce how much of the virus gets into your body

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California, San Francisco, has been working with a team of researchers to understand how more people could go through their infections with minimal or no symptoms.

About 40% of people infected with the virus don't have symptoms, according to an estimate last month by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gandhi's team found masks make a difference.

But once you're infected, how much of the virus made it into your body could also have an impact on what your experience is, another expert told CNN on Monday.

"What the mask does is really reduce the amount of virus that you get in, if you do get infected," she said. "And by reducing that ... you have a lower dose, you're able to manage it, you're able to have a calm response and you have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all."

[cnn.com]