T cells found in Covid-19 patients ‘bode well’ for long-term immunity

T cells found in Covid-19 patients ‘bode well’ for long-term immunity(sciencemag.org)

15 points by jmj42 6 years ago | 2 comments

The teams also asked whether people who haven’t been infected with SARS-CoV-2 also produce cells that combat it. Thiel and colleagues analyzed blood from 68 uninfected people and found that 34% hosted helper T cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2. The La Jolla team detected this crossreactivity in about half of stored blood samples collected between 2015 and 2018, well before the current pandemic began. The researchers think these cells were likely triggered by past infection with one of the four human coronaviruses that cause colds; proteins in these viruses resemble those of SARS-CoV-2.

If this is confirmed, this strikes me as something that could be a big deal. Interested to hear virologists and immunologists chime in on this.

gnusty_gnurc 6 years ago | |

As time goes on, things seem to line up with what Michael Levitt has been saying for a while now. Namely, that populations are reaching "saturation" pretty uniformly. And while he hasn't a clue what's causing it - he's ventured a guess at some type of innate immunity.

Back in mid-March:

> In Wuhan, which had the highest number of infection cases in the Hubei province, everyone had a chance of getting infected, but only 3% caught it,” he explained. “Even on the Diamond Princess (the virus-stricken cruise ship), the infection rate did not top 20%.” Based on these statistics, Levitt said, he concluded that many people are just naturally immune to the virus.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3800632...

In retrospect we know that the Diamond Princess numbers are wrong (the Chinese numbers are likely wrong too). Asymptomatic spread is probably much larger than what we could initially tell.

This study claims half the Diamond Princess infections were undetected - the infection rate was double.

https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/asymp-transmission.ht...