That’s the question everyone has to answer: how long are we protected from Covid-19 capture once we recover from the new coronavirus, and what does that mean?
Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated quarantine rules and seems to recommend that immunity can last up to 3 months.
“People who tested positive for COVID-19 want to be quarantined or re-tested for up to 3 months, as long as they no longer expand symptoms,” CDC rules said.
The agency’s website “was updated with this data in the middle of last week,” a CDC spokesman to CNN showed on Friday.
“I think it’s an incredibly sticky window, as the British would say,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, which doesn’t care about CDC guidelines.
“We believe the antibodies are correlated with protection, but we don’t know it yet,” Schaffner said. “This is a very general CDC, and as far as I know, it has no active consequences.”
Practical applications, Schaffner added, are still a long way off. Can a user with antibodies start dating or avoid dressing in a mask, for example? Absolutely not, he says categorically.
Our adaptive immune system, designed to target an express and past-identified invader, comprises two main mobile components: mobile B and mobile T. Until now, immunity studies have focused primarily on B mobiles, a type of white-blood mobile programmed to locate and join foreign invaders.
Once it has adhered to a virus like Covid-19, a mobile B “copies and produces antibodies, creating a mega army of neutralizers for this specific invader,” CNN’s leading medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said in an explanation in viral immunity.
“Unfortunately, some recent studies have shown that antibodies opposed to this specific coronavirus can quickly disappear, especially in others who have had mild cases of Covid-19,” Gupta said.
A preprinted paper (meaning it was not approved by scientists who are not part of the initial study) published in July revealed that antibody responses appear to decrease 20 to 30 days after the onset of the first symptoms of Covid-19.
“This study has vital implications when coverage is opposed to SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and the sustainability of vaccine coverage,” the researchers wrote in the document.
In June, a small test found that other people who have coronavirus infections but never expand symptoms may have weaker immune responses to the virus.
This examination revealed that an organization of approximately 3 dozen asymptomatic covid-19 patients had particularly lower levels of antibody than those discovered among patients with mild symptoms, a location that suggests asymptomatic patients had decreased immune responses.
In early July, a study by the Spanish government found that only 5% of others in Spain had antibodies to coronavirus and, in a potentially disruptive aspect, the study also indicated that other people’s immunity to coronavirus decreased after only a few weeks. The effects show that 95% of the Spanish population remains vulnerable to the virus.
This that any perceived immunity “may be incomplete, brief and then disappear,” Dr. Raquel Yotti, head of the Carlos III Institute of Health, said at a press conference at the time. The institute is a key government company that conducts the study.
Science expects Covid-19 to also cause an immune reaction from some other arm of the adaptive immune formula: T cells. A guy, called a reminiscence T cell, is helping to frame a rapid invader in case he returns.
A recent examination revealed such reminiscent of T cells in other people inflamed with SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that creates the disease called Covid-19. This location leads to the assumption that some other people would possibly have milder cases of Covid-19 because their T cells react to exposure to coronavirus found in the past.
SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a giant circle of coronavirus relatives, six of whom were known in the past to infect humans. Two are fatal: SARS-CoV-1, the virus guilty of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which ended in 2004; and MERS-CoV, the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
The other 4 cause colds, and as they circulate widely each year, it is conceivable that many other people have already been exposed to one of those so-called “cousins” of the new coronavirus.
“They have been studied and we know that after a cold, antibodies opposed to this human strain of coronavirus expand and will be protected, but it turns out that coverage starts to decrease after about a year,” Schaffner said.
“Now, when Covid-19 arrived, we wonder what coverage are they going to get against this virus? And if they get coverage, how long does it last?” he added. “We don’t know this habit yet.”
Another page on the CDC website, updated in June, refers to the uncertainty surrounding the role of antibodies in long-term infections.
“Having antibodies that oppose the virus so COVID-19 can simply provide opposite coverage to a new infection with the virus. If so, we don’t know what coverage the antibodies might offer or how long this coverage could last,” the CDC said. said of the evidence.
Until science knows more about the duration of immunity, Schaffner pleaded to follow the course of what is known to work: washing hands, keeping society away, avoiding crowds, and putting on masks.
“Don’t look for reasons to wear the mask, just use it. Get used to it,” Schaffner said. “We need to be in combination to be supportive.”
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