The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.
© 2020 AFPCOVID-19 reinfection casts doubt on virus immunity: study
By Patrick GALEY PARIS©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.
The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.
© 2020 AFP
4 Comments
Login to comment
virusrex
To be completely fair that is true for every other infectious disease, from measles to ebola. In medicine nothing is 100% true all the time.
Of course, but only if it is something that happens with a certain frequency. If you observe one reinfection for every million cases that would not have a significative impact.
That is not completely true, vaccines work by stimulating the immune response, including antibodies but also other parts of the system that can protect against future exposures. Antibodies are just the easiest to examine, not the only important part.
The real importance of studying these rare reinfections is because they let us understand better the infection and hopefully identify exactly what parts of the immune reaction are the most important to avoid complications.
Or the patient could have some natural susceptibility because of genetic variation, or low levels of some specific lymphocytes, or some comorbidity that was not identified the first time that lowered temporarily his immune system. As long as the reinfections are very limited it is more likely that the specific situation of the patient is responsible than a viral factor.
Extremely unlikely, like astronomically so.
ADE depends on having serotypes of the infection, that means that antibodies against one strain are not useful against a different strain (for Dengue there are 4 serotypes, so a completely healthy person can get infected 4 times with the disease) For COVID there is only one serotype identified yet.
Also, if ADE was the cause you would observe clusters of reinfections with very severe symptoms, because people infected once would not have any protection against the different serotype of the virus and many of those reinfected people would have very severe symptoms, even if they were young adults without comorbidities, that would be like a huge red alert if it happened anywhere in the world.
For any specific case this is true (unless specialized tests are done to search for differences in neutralization levels of the antibodies and curves of elevation on IgG and IgM), but in a community level epidemiological analysis would give very strong hints of this happening. This kind of data is relatively easier to get, so many researchers are using it to find out unusual patterns or outliers that could be of interest. So for now the possibility of reinfections being common remains very low.
And also to understand how long the immunity for the natural infection lasts.
Raw Beer
5 cases worldwide! Appears to be a very rare event.
Those who recovered from the 1st SARS CoV (17 years ago) still have the memory lymphocytes that would protect them from a second attack. So far, it appears to also be the case for SARSCoV2, but its too soon to know for sure. Time will tell.
ZENJI
And trump wants a rally of 10.000.
Good on you fella, the more bigly, the better.
R I P trump
Desert Tortoise
R I P : Remain In Prison