Can we become immune to COVID? Is the so-called convalescents may fall ill again? Scientists around the world are trying to investigate this to create an effective COVID-19 vaccine as soon as possible.

Johns Hopkins University data as of April 11, 2022 shows that 1,712,674 people worldwide are suffering from COVID, of which 388,910 have already been cured. Although the number of the so-called survivors is promising, but scientists are wondering if people who have been infected with the coronavirus mayget COVID a second time ?

Does COVID produce antibodies?

Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai analyzed blood taken from 175 patients who had been cured and had already left the hospital. The results showed that nearly a third of them had low levels of antibodies, and some patients had none at all. All the rest of the patients tested showedpresence of the antibodył, which gives hope that these people are immune to the coronavirus.

This study has not been validated in other hospitals: further testing should be carried out to see whether or not cured patients are at risk of reinfection.

Especially since the Shanghai study only looked at patients with mild COVID symptoms. People in intensive care could not be tested because during the treatment they were givenantibodies obtained from blood plasmaof other cured patients.

"The immune response to COVID-19 is not yet known,"
explains the CDC - a US government agency, so advises that survivors of infections continue to follow the general recommendations for greater hygiene. avoiding contact with sick people, etc.

How long does immunity last?

There is another issue of interest to researchers around the world, namely the duration of the presence of antibodies in the body. Due to the relatively short duration of the epidemic, it is difficult to say how long the antibodies provideprotection against recurrence ofm. More and more often it is said that, unfortunately, not for long.

Dr.Peter Jung, professor of paediatrics at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston in an interview said that studies of children infected with coronavirus showed short-term immunity toWuhan pathogen. In addition, according to the scientist, thevirus can mutateand - as in the case of influenza - attack a second, or perhaps another, time.

Recently, it has been reported that adult COVID-19 patients have antibodies for at least two weeks. Some studies show that they peak after about four months, andprovides protection forfor about two to three years. However, this is all unconfirmed information exactly.

Coronavirus and other pathogens

To do this, scientists looked at other pathogens in the coronavirus family. Most of them leave permanent immunity after some time. However, this is not always the case.

Resistance to seasonal coronaviruses (such as those that cause colds) begins to decline weeks after infection. This means that you can catch a cold two or three times in one year.

In the case of the chickenpox virus, after the disease has passed, the patient receives permanent immunity. On the other hand, tetanus infection does not provide such protection, therefore tetanus vaccination should be repeated from time to time.

The HIV virus, on the other hand, produces a huge number of antibodies, but they cannot stop infection.

Coronavirus is a new pathogen, so we do not know the immunity of its disease and whether the antibodies protect against re-infection. I don't have enough data to say this yet.

Antibody Tests

The US Food and Drug Administration has just approved the production of a test that checks the presence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the blood of patients. This isthe first suchtest to be launched soon.

Unlike diagnostic tests that confirm the presence and sometimes load or amount of a virus,antibody testshelp determine if someone has previously been infected - even if the person this one never showed symptoms.

Widespread use of such tests could give scientists greater insight into how deadly the virus is and how it spreads throughout the population. It can also answer the question of how long antibodies persist in the body of a cured person.

Production of vaccines

The study by scientists from Shanghai, which we mentioned at the beginning, is important not only because it can answer the question about coronavirus recontamination.

It is also important from the point of view of laboratories working on the development of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. If a real virus may not produce a responseorganism, will this situation not be repeated with the administration of the vaccine, which isa weakened version of the pathogen ?

Therefore, vaccine makers are looking for the so-called neutralizing antibodies. These are proteins that reduce and prevent infection by binding to the part of the virus that binds to human cells. If they exist at all, they should be used in the production of thecoronavirus vaccine .

Several small laboratory studies suggest that this is the case and that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the production of neutralizing antibodies. On the other hand, animal tests show that they offer protection against reinfection for at least several weeks.

That's not bad anyway, although most scientists would like the resistance to SARS-CoV-2 to resemble that acquired after suffering chickenpox. Unfortunately, everything indicates that we are dealing with a much more complex and dangerous pathogen.

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COVID 19