health

T-cell study adds to debate over duration of COVID-19 immunity

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By Kate Kelland

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© Thomson Reuters 2020.

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".....but did not mean that people could not in rare cases get infected twice with the disease." I can live with that. The very, very good does not have to be the enemy of the perfect. No known vaccine is perfect.

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This is very good news that has been expected from a while. It was known from before that people very symptomatic (that required hospitalization) have strong immunity that apparently last very long. But asymptomatic patients had not such evidence. Many people suspected this protection to be present on them because volunteers that have been vaccinated also have this immunity without the need of developing any symptoms. In this study the evidence appears to indicate that even mild infections could be protective (and this is supported by epidemiological data that shows that reinfections are very rare). Now we have to wait until more studies including a higher number of patients confirm these results and it will become much more easier to reduce the very heavy control measures.

Another development that is still in the waiting is having a good test that can be correlated with protection, current ones only look at antibodies, but for COVID-19 this is not enough, so any lab that can manage to simplify the long and difficult process of isolating T cells and check them for reactivity in a reasonable amount of time (and not too expensively) would do wonders to finally provide proof of immunity.

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