8 ms·

Is this good or bad news?

by bzb6 6y ago

BjoernKW 6y ago
This is good news because it suggests that immunity for SARS-CoV2 isn't worse than that for other coronaviruses (e.g. those causing the common cold), even for those individuals who didn't become so sick they had to be hospitalised. In a nutshell, you can't catch it again right away after having recovered.
- acqq 6y ago
  No honest scientist would say what you wrote as your “nutshell.” Specifically, T cell response is not equivalent at all to “you can’t catch it.” Still all scenarios are possible: 1) you can still catch it, and still get more sick 2) you can catch it, and be less sick 3) you can be “sterilizingly immune” meaning that you won’t get sick and won’t be able to transmit to somebody else. But which of those will be by majority the study just didn’t investigate. In immunology no answer is “yes” or “no” but the range. The range is different between different people, and we can conclude what the typical ranges are, if there’s enough data collected. But the ranges are still unknown at the moment. The same reason (a need to find the ranges) is why you can’t make a vaccine candidate and be sure how it will work, unless you run big and long enough trials. And that’s why that takes time. Here’s what this study figured out, quoting from the article: “The size of T cell response differed between individuals, being considerably (50%) higher in people who had experienced symptomatic disease at the time of infection six months previously. Further research will be needed to determine the significance of this finding.” As you see, again some range, but also not concluding what you claim.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    We have been running a "natural" trial on millions of people. From that, we can already tell that reinfection, although possible, is very rare.
    - acqq 6y ago
      > From that, we can already tell that reinfection, although possible, is very rare. No. From the current papers, we just know that the reinfection where people have had their virus sequenced in both first and second infection is very rare. The problem is technological. Up to now there are around 50 million confirmed cases in the world but probably less than 100 thousand sequencings performed, and only a few sequencings by those who had strong enough symptoms twice and had the chance to have sequencing twice. Without sequencing one just can’t prove that some case is an actual reinfection. All other cases are just “possible” (i.e. unprovable) reinfections and nobody can claim anything worthy of a scientific paper about them.
    - macintux 6y ago
      Can we really? Infection itself is still somewhat uncommon, thanks to the global reaction to the pandemic. I don't doubt that reinfection will be rare, at least over the span of a few months, but to my mind that would seem unproven given how hard we're (generally) working to keep people from being infected in the first place.
      - krona 6y ago
        In many countries, healthcare workers are exposed (to varying degrees) on a daily basis.
        Symmetry 6y ago
        Good point. I'd hope they'd receive regular testing as well.
        kaitai 6y ago
        Unfortunately, your hope is unfounded. My spouse is a physician and when coughing (acute bronchitis) could not get a test without job consequences (being forced to take 10 days off and reschedule all patients regardless of the outcome of the test). There has been an exposure in a neighboring ward through a fellow healthcare worker and tests are not being made available broadly. Remember, in the US healthcare workers generally have to go through insurance to get approved for tests, etc., even though they work in healthcare -- they're not at this time provided anything more than the general public in terms of diagnostics. (At least spouse gets free masks at work, haha...)
- Tylerian 6y ago
  > In a nutshell, you can't catch it again right away after having recovered. If that's the case, out of curiousity why there has been numerous reported cases of people that catched covid again after already recovering from it? Edit: So... after reading the article I'm not sure this is the case for all people as this research has been done only on a group of asymptomatic & low/mild response people. IMHO for a sentence like that to be valid, it should be demonstrated on the other part of the population, those that have a high immune response against the virus and end up in a critical state from it.
  - timr 6y ago
    "If that's the case, out of curiousity why there has been numerous reported cases of people that catched covid again after already recovering from it?" There have been many, many news articles that speculate about this, but to date, I'm aware of two papers that document re-infections. Both papers isolated and sequenced the viruses involved, and both papers documented re-infection with significantly mutated variants of the same virus.
    - thamer 6y ago
      Yes, here is an example of a paper that mentions a re-infection with significant genomic differences between the two samples: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30764-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
- skrebbel 6y ago
  I'm an absolute layman, but "no worse than the common cold" doesn't sound too great to me since I've always been told you can keep getting the cold over and over again. What am I missing?
  - rhino369 6y ago
    There are a lot of different common cold viruses, so catching one doesn't give you immunity for the rest.
    - skrebbel 6y ago
      (username checks out) Ah! I knew that this was true for the flu, but I always thought there was just a single Common Cold that you could get over and over again. Thanks!
      - rhino369 6y ago
        I think you can get most of them again, but not for a few years.
      - goodcanadian 6y ago
        If you look at the Wikipedia article, you will find more detailed information, but the common cold is caused primarily by rhinoviruses. However, some are also coronaviruses and even influenza viruses. There are hundreds of viruses that cause "the cold." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold
  - BjoernKW 6y ago
    There are several coronaviruses that cause what's commonly known as "the cold". If you catch one and recover you're likely to be immune against infections from the same viral strain for some time. For SARS-CoV2 and the COVID-19 disease it causes this means that even without the - quite likely - availability of a vaccine over time natural immunity will build up within individuals and the population as a whole, which has the potential of both making the resulting disease less severe and future waves spreading less. If most individuals who contract the virus during the next few months can't get sick anymore and can't spread the virus anymore for the about 6 months those individuals are taken out of the equation, which leaves less individuals for the virus to spread to in the next wave.
- jmcqk6 6y ago
  >In a nutshell, you can't catch it again right away after having recovered. "Can't" is too extreme. "Very unlikely" is much more accurate.
  - adrianb 6y ago
    Extrapolating from other coronaviruses, it's probably that you CAN catch it again but it's "very unlikely" to produce serious consequences after the first time. So basically only first time you will experience more serious symptoms like a fever, the subsequent infections would be trivial common cold. We'll see.
    - ljf 6y ago
      I think we should consider it to be as yet unproven - a person I know through my wife caught it in April (and tested positive them) and wasn't that ill. They just got very ill again in the last week and tested positive again. Might be totally a-typical or it could just be that we've not seen that many people actually have the chance to catch it twice yet.
      - mam2 6y ago
        Positive with what ? I head PCR stay positive a long time
testmen 6y ago
vote for biden - save the nation!
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Good grief can we not be done with the needless tribal politics already?
dataminer 6y ago
Sounds like good news, its observed that 6 months after recovering from SARS-CoV2 viral infection, the immune system in most of recovered people was able to identify and work fight off SARS-CoV2 virus. So if these people get in contact with the virus again, there will be less chance of them getting sick and transmitting it to other people.
ruairispain 6y ago
Following a load of doctors, this is from today... Not much scares me in this life. But just saw my first COVID reinfection this full moon Halloween & I am fucking shook. 20-something yo w/ massive PE, coded, TPA, ECMO in ED, hemorrhage, 3 code carts, methylene blue, PRBCs. Praying for them and their family And for all of us. https://t.co/T0YqmVxLx8 https://t.co/T0YqmVxLx8
- anoncake 6y ago
  How does this answer bzb6's question?
  - jaywalk 6y ago
    It doesn't. It's fear mongering.
    - makach 6y ago
      How are these facts fear mongering? Unless you know the facts how can you possibly make a good working strategy to fight this pandemic?
      - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        Because we live in a world of several billion people and a tweet from a doctor about 1 case does not tell us much on an aggregate scale.
        makach 6y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, and I agree.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - SamPatt 6y ago
        "Not much scares me ... fucking shock" The language is literally fear mongering. It's not an objective anecdote.
makach 6y ago
IANAD, immunity is complicated, and long term immunity after having recovered from CoVID-19 infection is not likely. This is bad news because it means that herd-immunity is not naturally achivable. It means you most get a vaccine at regular intervals to be protected against this strain of the virus. It also means that lockdown is best strategy to reduce strain on health services until vaccine is ready and freely distributed to all.
- anoncake 6y ago
  The article says people are immune for at least six months, not at most.
  - acqq 6y ago
    The article certainly doesn’t say anything about “people” at all. It demonstrates immune response in the serum, but not at all the effect of the said response, especially not if any person is actually “immune.”
- mikem170 6y ago
  >IANAD, immunity is complicated, and long term immunity after having recovered from CoVID-19 infection is not likely Replicated studies have already found that prior exposure to other coronavirus infections (common cold, animal viruses) leaves behind t-cells that are activates for covid-19, as long as 17 years. And that a large percentage of the population has these t-cells. [0] Does this change your opinion on herd immunity? [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9
  - makach 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing! All science affects my opinion. For me, not knowing, makes me have a pessimistic attitude. Lesson learnt is to keep this to myself.
    - mikem170 6y ago
rossdavidh 6y ago
I'm not sure if it even counts as "news", but it means that an infected-then-recovered person would be "resistant" for at least six months, which is exactly what the SIR model of infections would suggest. There were some suggestions that Covid-19 would be an exception to this somehow, and having recovered, you would still be just as susceptible to getting it again. Which, if it had been true, would have been really bad news, although I suppose it would also have meant there was no reason to wait for a vaccine, because if even the actual virus itself doesn't teach your immune system to look out for it, then there's no way a vaccine could. But, it's good scientific/medical work to verify that it works like most other viruses, and people who have recovered, are at least almost always going to be resistant thereafter (for at least six months, because that's all the time that has passed yet, although evidence from SARS suggests 10 years or more).
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > because if even the actual virus itself doesn't teach your immune system to look out for it, then there's no way a vaccine could I wouldn't say that completely follows. It would certainly indicate that developing a vaccine would be harder, but not impossible. Modern vaccine development is essentially fly fishing at this point: the amount of control and options we have with the immune response-generating stimuli exceeds naturally-ocurring scenarios. As an example, most of the spike-protein-expressing vaccines generate / deliver modified spike proteins, distinct from those found on actual SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
    Indeed. There are even some vaccines for diseases that our bodies do not defeat. I'm perhaps misremembering, but I seem to recall that the HPV vaccine is one of those.
    - joveian 6y ago
      I haven't even looked at much of anything vaccine related much less have any expertise, but the explanation I remember hearing at some point is that by priming the immune system our bodies can prevent the virus from getting established. Polio and smallpox are also hard for the body to fight off but were some of the earliest vaccines (smallpox being the first according to Wikipedia). I don't think it implies that it is possible to create vaccines in cases where our body can fight the disease but then does not retain that resistance over time, although I would guess there is at lest some chance that is possible.

Is this good or bad news?

by bzb6 6y ago

Is this good or bad news?

This is good news because it suggests that immunity for SARS-CoV2 isn't worse than that for other coronaviruses (e.g. those causing the common cold), even for those individuals who didn't become so sick they had to be hospitalised. In a nutshell, you can't catch it again right away after having recovered.

acqq 6y ago
No honest scientist would say what you wrote as your “nutshell.” Specifically, T cell response is not equivalent at all to “you can’t catch it.” Still all scenarios are possible: 1) you can still catch it, and still get more sick 2) you can catch it, and be less sick 3) you can be “sterilizingly immune” meaning that you won’t get sick and won’t be able to transmit to somebody else. But which of those will be by majority the study just didn’t investigate. In immunology no answer is “yes” or “no” but the range. The range is different between different people, and we can conclude what the typical ranges are, if there’s enough data collected. But the ranges are still unknown at the moment. The same reason (a need to find the ranges) is why you can’t make a vaccine candidate and be sure how it will work, unless you run big and long enough trials. And that’s why that takes time. Here’s what this study figured out, quoting from the article: “The size of T cell response differed between individuals, being considerably (50%) higher in people who had experienced symptomatic disease at the time of infection six months previously. Further research will be needed to determine the significance of this finding.” As you see, again some range, but also not concluding what you claim.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  We have been running a "natural" trial on millions of people. From that, we can already tell that reinfection, although possible, is very rare.
  - acqq 6y ago
    > From that, we can already tell that reinfection, although possible, is very rare. No. From the current papers, we just know that the reinfection where people have had their virus sequenced in both first and second infection is very rare. The problem is technological. Up to now there are around 50 million confirmed cases in the world but probably less than 100 thousand sequencings performed, and only a few sequencings by those who had strong enough symptoms twice and had the chance to have sequencing twice. Without sequencing one just can’t prove that some case is an actual reinfection. All other cases are just “possible” (i.e. unprovable) reinfections and nobody can claim anything worthy of a scientific paper about them.
  - macintux 6y ago
    Can we really? Infection itself is still somewhat uncommon, thanks to the global reaction to the pandemic. I don't doubt that reinfection will be rare, at least over the span of a few months, but to my mind that would seem unproven given how hard we're (generally) working to keep people from being infected in the first place.
    - krona 6y ago
      In many countries, healthcare workers are exposed (to varying degrees) on a daily basis.
      - Symmetry 6y ago
        Good point. I'd hope they'd receive regular testing as well.
        kaitai 6y ago
        Unfortunately, your hope is unfounded. My spouse is a physician and when coughing (acute bronchitis) could not get a test without job consequences (being forced to take 10 days off and reschedule all patients regardless of the outcome of the test). There has been an exposure in a neighboring ward through a fellow healthcare worker and tests are not being made available broadly. Remember, in the US healthcare workers generally have to go through insurance to get approved for tests, etc., even though they work in healthcare -- they're not at this time provided anything more than the general public in terms of diagnostics. (At least spouse gets free masks at work, haha...)
Tylerian 6y ago
> In a nutshell, you can't catch it again right away after having recovered. If that's the case, out of curiousity why there has been numerous reported cases of people that catched covid again after already recovering from it? Edit: So... after reading the article I'm not sure this is the case for all people as this research has been done only on a group of asymptomatic & low/mild response people. IMHO for a sentence like that to be valid, it should be demonstrated on the other part of the population, those that have a high immune response against the virus and end up in a critical state from it.
- timr 6y ago
  "If that's the case, out of curiousity why there has been numerous reported cases of people that catched covid again after already recovering from it?" There have been many, many news articles that speculate about this, but to date, I'm aware of two papers that document re-infections. Both papers isolated and sequenced the viruses involved, and both papers documented re-infection with significantly mutated variants of the same virus.
  - thamer 6y ago
    Yes, here is an example of a paper that mentions a re-infection with significant genomic differences between the two samples: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30764-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
skrebbel 6y ago
I'm an absolute layman, but "no worse than the common cold" doesn't sound too great to me since I've always been told you can keep getting the cold over and over again. What am I missing?
- rhino369 6y ago
  There are a lot of different common cold viruses, so catching one doesn't give you immunity for the rest.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    (username checks out) Ah! I knew that this was true for the flu, but I always thought there was just a single Common Cold that you could get over and over again. Thanks!
    - rhino369 6y ago
      I think you can get most of them again, but not for a few years.
    - goodcanadian 6y ago
      If you look at the Wikipedia article, you will find more detailed information, but the common cold is caused primarily by rhinoviruses. However, some are also coronaviruses and even influenza viruses. There are hundreds of viruses that cause "the cold." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold
- BjoernKW 6y ago
  There are several coronaviruses that cause what's commonly known as "the cold". If you catch one and recover you're likely to be immune against infections from the same viral strain for some time. For SARS-CoV2 and the COVID-19 disease it causes this means that even without the - quite likely - availability of a vaccine over time natural immunity will build up within individuals and the population as a whole, which has the potential of both making the resulting disease less severe and future waves spreading less. If most individuals who contract the virus during the next few months can't get sick anymore and can't spread the virus anymore for the about 6 months those individuals are taken out of the equation, which leaves less individuals for the virus to spread to in the next wave.
jmcqk6 6y ago
>In a nutshell, you can't catch it again right away after having recovered. "Can't" is too extreme. "Very unlikely" is much more accurate.
- adrianb 6y ago
  Extrapolating from other coronaviruses, it's probably that you CAN catch it again but it's "very unlikely" to produce serious consequences after the first time. So basically only first time you will experience more serious symptoms like a fever, the subsequent infections would be trivial common cold. We'll see.
  - ljf 6y ago
    I think we should consider it to be as yet unproven - a person I know through my wife caught it in April (and tested positive them) and wasn't that ill. They just got very ill again in the last week and tested positive again. Might be totally a-typical or it could just be that we've not seen that many people actually have the chance to catch it twice yet.
    - mam2 6y ago
      Positive with what ? I head PCR stay positive a long time

testmen 6y ago

vote for biden - save the nation!

rootusrootus 6y ago
Good grief can we not be done with the needless tribal politics already?

dataminer 6y ago

Sounds like good news, its observed that 6 months after recovering from SARS-CoV2 viral infection, the immune system in most of recovered people was able to identify and work fight off SARS-CoV2 virus. So if these people get in contact with the virus again, there will be less chance of them getting sick and transmitting it to other people.

ruairispain 6y ago

Following a load of doctors, this is from today... Not much scares me in this life. But just saw my first COVID reinfection this full moon Halloween & I am fucking shook. 20-something yo w/ massive PE, coded, TPA, ECMO in ED, hemorrhage, 3 code carts, methylene blue, PRBCs. Praying for them and their family And for all of us. https://t.co/T0YqmVxLx8 https://t.co/T0YqmVxLx8

anoncake 6y ago
How does this answer bzb6's question?
- jaywalk 6y ago
  It doesn't. It's fear mongering.
  - makach 6y ago
    How are these facts fear mongering? Unless you know the facts how can you possibly make a good working strategy to fight this pandemic?
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      Because we live in a world of several billion people and a tweet from a doctor about 1 case does not tell us much on an aggregate scale.
      - makach 6y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, and I agree.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - SamPatt 6y ago
      "Not much scares me ... fucking shock" The language is literally fear mongering. It's not an objective anecdote.

makach 6y ago

IANAD, immunity is complicated, and long term immunity after having recovered from CoVID-19 infection is not likely. This is bad news because it means that herd-immunity is not naturally achivable. It means you most get a vaccine at regular intervals to be protected against this strain of the virus. It also means that lockdown is best strategy to reduce strain on health services until vaccine is ready and freely distributed to all.

anoncake 6y ago
The article says people are immune for at least six months, not at most.
- acqq 6y ago
  The article certainly doesn’t say anything about “people” at all. It demonstrates immune response in the serum, but not at all the effect of the said response, especially not if any person is actually “immune.”
mikem170 6y ago
>IANAD, immunity is complicated, and long term immunity after having recovered from CoVID-19 infection is not likely Replicated studies have already found that prior exposure to other coronavirus infections (common cold, animal viruses) leaves behind t-cells that are activates for covid-19, as long as 17 years. And that a large percentage of the population has these t-cells. [0] Does this change your opinion on herd immunity? [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9
- makach 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing! All science affects my opinion. For me, not knowing, makes me have a pessimistic attitude. Lesson learnt is to keep this to myself.
  - mikem170 6y ago

rossdavidh 6y ago

I'm not sure if it even counts as "news", but it means that an infected-then-recovered person would be "resistant" for at least six months, which is exactly what the SIR model of infections would suggest. There were some suggestions that Covid-19 would be an exception to this somehow, and having recovered, you would still be just as susceptible to getting it again. Which, if it had been true, would have been really bad news, although I suppose it would also have meant there was no reason to wait for a vaccine, because if even the actual virus itself doesn't teach your immune system to look out for it, then there's no way a vaccine could. But, it's good scientific/medical work to verify that it works like most other viruses, and people who have recovered, are at least almost always going to be resistant thereafter (for at least six months, because that's all the time that has passed yet, although evidence from SARS suggests 10 years or more).

ethbr0 6y ago
> because if even the actual virus itself doesn't teach your immune system to look out for it, then there's no way a vaccine could I wouldn't say that completely follows. It would certainly indicate that developing a vaccine would be harder, but not impossible. Modern vaccine development is essentially fly fishing at this point: the amount of control and options we have with the immune response-generating stimuli exceeds naturally-ocurring scenarios. As an example, most of the spike-protein-expressing vaccines generate / deliver modified spike proteins, distinct from those found on actual SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
- Zach_the_Lizard 6y ago
  Indeed. There are even some vaccines for diseases that our bodies do not defeat. I'm perhaps misremembering, but I seem to recall that the HPV vaccine is one of those.
  - joveian 6y ago
    I haven't even looked at much of anything vaccine related much less have any expertise, but the explanation I remember hearing at some point is that by priming the immune system our bodies can prevent the virus from getting established. Polio and smallpox are also hard for the body to fight off but were some of the earliest vaccines (smallpox being the first according to Wikipedia). I don't think it implies that it is possible to create vaccines in cases where our body can fight the disease but then does not retain that resistance over time, although I would guess there is at lest some chance that is possible.