PHE researchers believe people with high levels of T-cells likely to have picked up immunity from coronaviruses like common cold
A quarter of people may already be immune to coronavirus even though many of them have never been infected, a new study by Public Health England (PHE) suggests.
Cross Immunity
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- Your immune system’s ‘memory’ T cells keep track of the viruses they have seen before.
- New study led by scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) shows that memory helper T cells that recognize common cold coronaviruses also recognize matching sites on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
- Having a strong T cell response, or a better T cell response may give you the opportunity to mount a much quicker and stronger response.
- 40%-60% of people never exposed to SARS-CoV-2 had T cells that reacted to the virus showing that their immune systems recognized the virus.
- This finding turned out to be a global phenomenon and was reported in people from the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom and Singapore.
- This discovery suggests that fighting off a common cold coronavirus can induce cross-reactive T cell memory against SARS-CoV-2.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-exposure-common-cold-coronaviruses-immune.html
It is known that severe COVID-19 cases in small children are rare. If a childhood-related infection would be protective against severe course of COVID-19, it would be expected that adults with intensive and regular contact to small children also may have a mild course of COVID-19 more frequently. To test this hypothesis, a survey among 4,010 recovered COVID-19 patients was conducted in Germany. 1,186 complete answers were collected. 6.9% of these patients reported frequent and regular job-related contact to children below 10 years of age and 23.2% had own small children, which is higher than expected. In the relatively small subgroup with intensive care treatment (n=19), patients without contact to small children were overrepresented. These findings are not well explained by age, gender or BMI distribution of those patients and should be validated in other settings.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.20.20157149v1
Interview highlights:
- We have already developed herd immunity to COVID-19 and will continue to manage it through herd immunity.
- Flu is much more dangerous than COVID-19.
- COVID-19 will settle into an endemic state just like flu.
- Hopefully vaccines will be important in protecting the vulnerable.
- Another way to protect the vulnerable sector is to allow the population to develop natural immunity.
- There’s no reason to think the virus will mutate into a lower level of virulence.
- During the 1918 flu because of a large number of ‘immunologically naive’ individuals but this is not the case with COVID-19.
- Most of us have some degree of coronavirus immunity and therefore some protection to COVID-19.
- The current H1 influenza strain is antigenically identical to the 1918 flu. H1 flu doesn’t kill as many people as the 1918 flu because most people already have cross immunity.
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