Immunity To the Coronavirus May Last Years, New Data Hint (nytimes.com) 68
How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study -- the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination. From a report: Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come. The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date. "That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years," said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.
The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control. And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering. The findings are consistent with encouraging evidence emerging from other labs. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by the immunologist Marion Pepper, had earlier shown that certain "memory" cells that were produced following infection with the coronavirus persist for at least three months in the body. The study has yet to be published and peer-reviewed.
The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control. And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering. The findings are consistent with encouraging evidence emerging from other labs. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by the immunologist Marion Pepper, had earlier shown that certain "memory" cells that were produced following infection with the coronavirus persist for at least three months in the body. The study has yet to be published and peer-reviewed.
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We're about to transition into the beginning of the end.
Approving a vaccine is just a start; it'll take months from that time until we have hit the herd immunity threshold. Public health experts really hate to overpromise because they want people to be prepared if things take longer than expected, but I think life will probably have returned to something resembling normal by this time next year.
This last bit is going to be like swimming the last five yards of 50m Olympic swimming pool underwater. Objectivel
Re: It's starting to feel like we're almost done (Score:3)
When combined with restricted visitation and social distancing, getting vaccines into areas that are vulnerable like hospitals and adult care will make a huge improvement on fatalities in the very near future and without requiring general public availability of a vaccine.
If we're not totally stupid, we'll put healthcare workers, first-responders, military at the head of the line. (having your military temporarily knocked out is one of the things cranking our doomsday clock towards midnight). Next are vulner
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This last bit is going to be like swimming the last five yards of 50m Olympic swimming pool underwater. Objectively it won't take long but subjectively it's going to be a challenge not to give up early. For most people it won't make much difference, but it'd be a shame to infect vulnerable people with the end so near.
There's more than that. The number of infected people at the time the vaccine comes into circulation will more or less determine the number of mutations that go up against the vaccine and thus the chance that one of them has a vaccine resistant variation in the spike protein which most vaccines target. If we can get infections down low just before we get to mass vaccination then the chance of getting completely rid of SARS-COV-2 is much higher.
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That should be very short then:
Trump: Don't elect a socialist
Biden: I'm calling a lid
That was their entire manifesto right? I didn't hear much else that wasn't copy-pasta from the regular sources.
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Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard of two documented cases of a person getting COVID twice. I haven't searched, but given the massive number of cases, a tiny handful is getting hit twice. I would expect this with any disease, just like you don't get absolutely 100% effectiveness with a vaccine. Biology is highly complex, so the systems don't work exactly as advertised every time.
I take this a good news.
If immunity from COVID were typically only one year or less, we would be starting to see thousands of repeat cases in New York. But we're not.
Soon the biggest COVID threat will be the anti-vaxxers.
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Re:Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
That's an incredibly optimistic view, especially considering the original infections were 7-8 months ago.
Where I live, roughly 1% of the population is known to have been infected, but the recent peak - things really went pear shaped around 5 weeks ago - is between 3 and 4 times as bad as it ever got in April.
In a year we will be better able to see if immunity lasts a year.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. With fifty million COVID-19 cases worldwide, there's going to be documented instances of occurrences that are alarming, but so rare the average person shouldn't worry about them. It's kind of like air travel; nobody disputes that some people die in plane crashes, but it's not worth worrying about.
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It's kind of like air travel; nobody disputes that some people die in plane crashes, but it's not worth worrying about.
Unless it's a 737 Max [slashdot.org]
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The 737 Max fatal crash rate is 3 per million flights. That's over 10x the fatal crash rate of 737 family, but nothing compared to the Concorde, which has had 11.36 fatal crashes per million flights.
From a regulatory standpoint the 737 Max is unacceptably dangerous, but it's still pretty safe from a passenger standpoint.
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Soon the biggest COVID threat will be the anti-vaxxers.
Well, then I hope they're all running around right now without a mask so they can get their immunity the old fashioned way. I say this in only slight sarcasm, since they're the types to also believe masks don't work, there's nothing to do, and we should just reopen and move on anyways. Basically they are already the current covid threat.
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The majority are asymptotic or suffer very minor symptoms, the vast majority. Only a minority suffer to any great extent, the over fifty. So an over fifty only vaccine probably even an over sixty five, voluntary vaccine but where's the profit in that. The same place the buried the test results for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and the those that died in nursing homes for the poor elderly when they stuffed them full infected young people.
What the sheeple will swallow, the ignorant believers, as they are
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I've heard of two documented cases of a person getting COVID twice. I haven't searched, but given the massive number of cases, a tiny handful is getting hit twice.
Be careful about the denominator of your search. They only searched for and reported cases of getting a slightly different strain of COVID. That's because if someone got the same strain, there'd be no way to tell whether they got COVID a second time, or if it merely was the first time that never quite fully went away.
So it's true there was a massive number of cases overall. But when you say "2 out of X" then your X should only be the number of people who got one strain once and were exposed to but didn't ca
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I agree it is obvious: if immunity did not last there would be hundreds of thousands of examples of people getting Covid twice. Right now the number of examples are so small they are swamped by the noise of the inaccuracy of the testing.
I suspect though that showing this conclusively requires more work than just seeing that it is apparently true. Also extrapolating to a longer period than Covid has been around requires knowledge of how our immune systems respond to other virus. So this paper is probably a u
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I have a proof, but it's too long to fit in the margin here. :)
If immunity typically lasted only a year, there would be enough variance that we would have plenty of examples now. Yeah, the paper is useful for those studying the science, and probably has important details, but for someone who is only a medical expert on the Internet, I can skip it.
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Good point about how many double-cases would not know it. I think my guess of how many people would be known to have it twice is probably high. More like thousands of people who get it twice would be known. Since this is not happening I still feel it is pretty obvious that you do become immune after the first infection and it lasts.
Fantastic (Score:3)
This greatly lowers the chance of it becoming endemic.
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Sure but it's not something people need to get a seasonal inoculation against like influenza. The fact that the inoculation lasts years means it can be eradicated and will no longer be a threat to major nations.
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Just as well. Smallpox took ~20 years to eradicate through vaccination programs.
(Not that they're comparable diseases, or that the world is the same place as it was ~20 years ago, but it gives some idea as to the mammoth task ahead.)
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Yes, you are right, smallpox did lingered because of minor nations. However, smallpox is waaay more contagious [ctvnews.ca], so covid-19 may burn itself out rather quickly.
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Gotta love how 250,000 people dying in a few months is confirmation of one's delusions.
Really? (Score:2)
The paper hasn't even been published and peer-reviewed so why in the heck are we even discussing this? Oh, that's right, this is /..
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The paper hasn't even been published and peer-reviewed so why in the heck are we even discussing this? Oh, that's right, this is /..
I also love that TFS has it in the quoted section, but the submitter or msmash felt the need to point that out in the last sentence above and beyond TFS...
Let's hope so (Score:3)
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I'm not sure we should be that pessimistic. The biggest unknown was getting a working vaccine in the first place. Ramping up production capacity is something we've been anticipating since the pandemic's scope was known, and have been preparing for in advance by speculatively increasing manufacturing capacity.
Moderna is already projecting they'll have 20 million doses ready by the end of this year, and are hoping to ramp up to 500 million to 1 billion in 2021. That alone may fully cover US requirements, e
Re:Let's hope so (Score:5, Informative)
* the prospects for lasting immunity from vaccination are very good,
* the vaccines will provide strong protection in the great majority of patients,
* the coronavirus can’t undergo the wholesale changes that we see with the influenza viruses. And the mutations we’re seeing so far appear to still be under the umbrella of the antibody protection we’ll be raising with vaccination,
* our first look at efficacy in older patients is very good indeed, and that’s the most significant high-risk patient subgroup taken care of right off the top
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For me (as someone at low risk of COVID) the most exciting thing is that the mRNA vaccines are doing what they were designed to do. And that is key, because the main reason they were developed was so that they could be rapidly designed to do specific tasks.
We are so close now to have miraculous cures for many types of cancer. The next 10 years could easily be a sort of enlightenment in the battle against cancer and other genetic diseases in the same way that antibiotics revolutionised medicine almost overni
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Immunity is generally for life. Yes, your immunity can diminish, but it doesn't go away completely. The reason we have a flu vaccine on a 6 month basis is because the flu mutates quickly. If COVID-19 mutated as quick as flu, we'd likewise have no vaccine until a decent mRNA vaccine was built. At least one company built an mRNA vaccine, they likewise had mRNA vaccines for flu and HIV but the FDA takes FOREVER to approve these things so we haven't seen them yet.
Link (Score:5, Informative)
The link in TFS is not to the study; it's to a paywalled article in the NY Times. I couldn't find a link to the study itself, but here's the same article, published by the Seattle Times, that's not paywalled. [seattletimes.com]
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Here's the link to the preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/conten... [biorxiv.org]
IMHO more important finding is that T-cellls HELP. (Score:2)
The severe form of COVID-19 involves a cytokine storm - an overreaction of the immune system that attacks the body and snowballs in positive feedback. The damage to the lungs, especially, is mainly from the immune system's overreaction, similar to (the debilitating and life-truncating) hypersensitivity pneumonitis.
One concern with candidate COVID-19 immunizations, especially if they produced the long-lasting T-cell sensitization, was that they might provoke a reaction that would make the disease worse or t
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That's why we have human test subjects. All the vaccines have started their human trials months ago, no indications of any issues. Immunizations typically don't introduce live virus, so it's extremely unlikely to have any symptoms related to the actual disease because there is nothing that multiplies, so there is no feedback loop that triggers the cytokine storm.
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Immunizations typically don't introduce live virus, so it's extremely unlikely to have any symptoms related to the actual disease because there is nothing that multiplies, so there is no feedback loop that triggers the cytokine storm.
Immunizations not introducing the virus is irrelevant. The issue is whether the immunization-caused T-cell "memory" might be harmful, because, when the patient is later exposed to the virus, the T-cell mediated reaction to it might produce (or increase the probability of the o
If only (Score:2)
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You seem to be confused. The antibodies attack the spike protein and that is what you want to look for. If your body successfully killed off all the Covid there would be no spike proteins.
The current mRNA vaccines cause your body to create spike proteins, but the purpose is so your body also produces antibodies against the spike proteins. In theory the antibodies will remain long after all those spike proteins and the mRNA are gone.
PS: I am almost certain I had Covid, and got an antibody test, and it came b
Re: If only (Score:2)
Re: If only (Score:2)
The media hates this article (Score:4, Interesting)
Now they can't scare us with their "this person had covid twice" double infection headliners anymore.
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Now they can't scare us with their "this person had covid twice" double infection headliners anymore.
Nah, they're already on to the mutant strains that will render the vaccine and prior immunity ineffective. There is the mink one in Denmark and I saw some ramblings about a 'new more infectious' strain in Australia based on a bunch of anecdotes.
Plenty of scare mongering to keep everyone busy. And just wait until the vaccine starts rolling out and they go nuts over the first person who takes it and dies of a heart attack a month later.
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Its because everyone is indoors which increases the spread rate. (this happened in Arizona and southern states in summer because everyone was indoors in summer because it was hot)
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Now they can't scare us with their "this person had covid twice"
I'm not in the media and I had it twice - 7 months apart.
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Sorry to hear that but you are a rarity, I don't worry about dying in a car or plane crash because of the low probability of it actually happening (and most people don't either). Neither should we worry about people who have immune systems that can't clear the infection and remember what happened.
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I know it's not usual.
The first one did little other than give me a temperature for a week. The second one was followed a few days later with pneumonia and other fun stuff. I am OK now but I was in hospital (horizontal) for 2 and a half weeks! While I was there, I heard that someone in the USA had made the news because he had Covid-19 for a second time and "experts" were exited. It is not the norm but it is far from rare - so I was told while in.
Indeed and we'll know for sure ... (Score:1)
...in a few years.
Immune systems (Score:2)
Stands to reason there is a very good reason nature equipped us with one.
Not always (Score:2)
Having had it in February and September, I don't think this is always the case.
Pehaps it is because I work in a hospital but I am not really at the sharp end. I work in IT. Normally I am one of those people who does not get sick but things change...