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I am not an epidemiologist (it took me three tries to even spell it correctly), but here's my baseless internet speculation. Maybe seasonal coronaviruses have
by Imnimo 6y ago
I am not an epidemiologist (it took me three tries to even spell it correctly), but here's my baseless internet speculation. Maybe seasonal coronaviruses have this short-lived immunity because they've been been exposed to a lot of selective pressure for it. If our bodies produced long-term immunity to a coronavirus, it'd tend to die out, while ones that only induce short-term immunity would tend to survive by re-circulating. So maybe it's sort of obvious that common coronaviruses would have short-term immunity, but that doesn't really tell us much about a random novel coronavirus? Or is that crazy?
- leereeves 6y agoI'm not an epidemiologist either, but to this layperson, the viruses studied seem to have been chosen on criteria that select for short-lived immunity. It seems likely that "seasonal" viruses, viruses "that regularly circulate to cause the condition we recognize as the common cold" must induce short-lived immunity. Would it be possible for a virus that induced long-lived immunity to be seasonal, reoccurring year after year? And why were the other coronaviruses that infect humans left out of the study?
- jhayward 6y ago> And why were the other coronaviruses that infect humans left out of the study Because one of them, SARS-1 went extinct in just over a year due to a heroic international response, and the other, MERS, has about a 35% fatality rate and is unlikely to be found in anyone who does not have direct contact with camels.