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Previous infection provides relatively short-lived natural immunity to COVID-19. I tested positive the last week of December 2020 (exactly three weeks before I

Previous infection provides relatively short-lived natural immunity to COVID-19. I tested positive the last week of December 2020 (exactly three weeks before I was scheduled to get the vaccine, which I did also eventually get). When I spoke to the county health department, they said they had already seen repeat infections. They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months, which is backed up by the fact that the virus had only been in my state about 10 months at that point. Vaccine protection is much more robust.

erhk 5y ago
No its not and this kind of speculation is incredibly harmful. Please stop using atomic anecdotes to percieve the world, or at least stop propogating them.
- kurthr 5y ago
  How do you know it is not more robust? Almost certainly vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections (especially those that rely on the innate immune response rather than adaptive immune response). Asymptomatic infections (especially in the young) are extremely common and possibly in the majority for those under 30.
  - pc86 5y ago
    We know it's not robust because this anecdote of N==1 directly contradicts peer-reviewed longitudinal studies.
    - kurthr 5y ago
      Should I assume that you're referring to a JAMA article or perhaps one of the Nature publications? Those only measured patients who suffered acute symptoms. Those are unlikely to represent even a bare majority of infections although it's quite difficult to get accurate data for asymptomatic infections. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03696-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03696-9 "only 10% had been hospitalized" I look forward to your citation of relevant peer-reviewed longitudinal studies. Even more interesting from a medical point of view, what mechanism do you propose for developing long term immunity, where the innate immune system rapidly controls infection?
      - erhk 5y ago
        Your article only suggests that getting vaccinated after infection is still better than not getting vaccinated after infection. The point I made was that vaccination is not more robust than being infected, or at least dont assume it is without solid evidence to support it.
        kurthr 5y ago
        All of the articles you are referring to are for acute/mild/moderate cases of COVID and do not cover to the significant number (particularly in younger cases) of asymptomatic and still infectious carriers, which I specifically called out in both the first and second post. The whole point is that the adaptive immune system doesn't really ramp up for many days up to weeks, while viral load typically peaks at 3-5 days. That's why the second shot is typically delayed for the MRNA vaccines. A young asymptomatic carrier with a strong innate response who recovers early is unlikely to develop a significant adaptive immune response (e.g. test positive on an antibody serology) thus they are also then very unlikely to develop durable immunity.
      - sreque 5y ago
        https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(21)00203-2 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37... "Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells". Is that good enough for you?
        kurthr 5y ago
        Similar to the other article I sited, "we were unable to evaluate immune memory in those with the extreme presentations, both asymptomatic and severe COVID-19" So unfortunately since I specifically and repeatedly referred to asymptomatic cases, which are relatively common in those under 30, it is not good enough. If I could edit my original post to <B>BOLD</B> asymptomatic even more, I would, since I highly doubt you're going to find many studies on that group.
h3cate 5y ago
Are there any links to studies that say antibodies produced from having covid only last 3-6 months?
- da_chicken 5y ago
  Here's a recent study from this month: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 A quick scan says: * 13% of those with natural immunity "lost detectable IgG titers" after 10 months * Protection durability from the vaccine is still mostly unknown, but appears to be good for 2-3 years My anecdote is from 8 months ago, so I'm not surprised the data has been revised. I got my first dose of the vaccine less than a week after I'd recovered, which at the time was the recommendation of the CDC and health department. Less than three weeks after my first dose, they revised that to have people wait six to eight weeks.
  - h3cate 5y ago
    Strange as vaccines were only starting to be rolled out 5 months ago and yet my country and already starting booster shots next month
    - da_chicken 5y ago
      Did your country do a staged rollout where healthcare workers, the elderly, and the infirm were vaccinated first? That's how I got mine in January. I work at a public K-12, where our staff were vaccinated in Phase 1b.
      - h3cate 5y ago
        Yes frontline staff started getting them around January but the elderly are the ones getting the boosters over here and that was around March time if my memory serves correctly
- AndrewBissell 5y ago
  The myopic focus on antibody levels is misplaced. We know that for Covid there are much broader forms of immune response which are not captured by antibody titers and are quite long lasting.
WoodenChair 5y ago
> They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months I'm sorry about your experience. Having Covid sucks. But your anecdotal data here is inaccurate at best, especially since it was from pre-Delta variant (you said December 2020 was your time of this happening) and we do have studies from that time showing how robust immunity was for those who had natural infections: "Available scientific data suggests that in most people immune responses remain robust and protective against reinfection for at least 6-8 months after infection (the longest follow up with strong scientific evidence is currently approximately 8 months)." [0] No offense, but these kind of anecdotal reports that "someone said" (even a health official), which sound authoritative because of the context, are how misinformation spreads. 0: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-2019-nCoV-Sci-Brief-Natural-immunity-2021.1-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-...
- da_chicken 5y ago
  While my figure of 3-6 months has been revised upward to 6, 8 or 10 months, the core sentiment of my post remains unchanged: Vaccine immunity is believed to be better. Vaccines are still believed to be good for 2-3 years based on how similar vaccines for other coronaviruses have worked. That is either enough time for the immune system's natural protection to atrophy, or for the virus to change. That still means vaccine immunity is likely to be more robust protection than natural immunity, even though the general sentiment seems to be a shrug for how long protection from the vaccine will actually last. [0] That's why they still exclusively discuss being fully vaccinated, and discount natural immunity. They believe it's better. Furthermore, I have seen no-one in the health community that has recommended not getting the vaccine if you've already had the virus. Compare this to, for example, chicken pox, where they only recommend the vaccine if you haven't had it. In the context of this thread where the comment I was responding to was trying to argue that natural immunity is being short-changed somehow, I think the sentiment I'm expressing is perfectly accurate regardless of how exact timelines have been shifted in the past year. You still need to get fully vaccinated even if you've had the disease. Nothing about that has changed. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 -- This study was published this month
krona 5y ago
The vaccine will prime your immunity to one (important) protein. Natural infection could prime your immunity to up to 29 proteins. I'm not sure 'robustness' right word in the context of rapidly evolving variants.
- wang_li 5y ago
  According to data from Israel, immunity from having gotten the infection is much better at stopping the delta variant by a factor of around 7x. Other research shows that natural immunity is long lasting. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    That's not what that study shows.
    - wang_li 5y ago
      The link is for the second sentence. To quote from the abstract: > Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans. As far as the reports from Israel: > By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        > The link is for the second sentence. Gotcha, that was not at all clear from your comment. Thanks for providing a citation for the other claims, I'll take a look at it.
majkinetor 5y ago
> Vaccine protection is much more robust. This is insane. No vaccine works better then natural protection from real stuff - simply because its less stressful to the body and more stress equals better immunity. I have nothing against vaccines in general but this is nothing but pharma propaganda.
newbamboo 5y ago
Neither you nor the parent are paying attention to recent science. Natural immunity lasts longer than the current vaccines. And it’s likely the virus will escape the current vaccines over a long enough timeline. That’s not a problem if we can roll out new vaccines quickly enough to stay in front of new mutations. But that’s an if. This is the reason Fauci and others who understand the science are focusing on treatments.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  Here’s the source for my claims. Still preprint but the best (only randomized) study to date. https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/covid-19-infection-survey/results/new-studies https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/covid-19-infection-survey/...

erhk 5y ago

No its not and this kind of speculation is incredibly harmful. Please stop using atomic anecdotes to percieve the world, or at least stop propogating them.

kurthr 5y ago
How do you know it is not more robust? Almost certainly vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections (especially those that rely on the innate immune response rather than adaptive immune response). Asymptomatic infections (especially in the young) are extremely common and possibly in the majority for those under 30.
- pc86 5y ago
  We know it's not robust because this anecdote of N==1 directly contradicts peer-reviewed longitudinal studies.
  - kurthr 5y ago
    Should I assume that you're referring to a JAMA article or perhaps one of the Nature publications? Those only measured patients who suffered acute symptoms. Those are unlikely to represent even a bare majority of infections although it's quite difficult to get accurate data for asymptomatic infections. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03696-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03696-9 "only 10% had been hospitalized" I look forward to your citation of relevant peer-reviewed longitudinal studies. Even more interesting from a medical point of view, what mechanism do you propose for developing long term immunity, where the innate immune system rapidly controls infection?
    - erhk 5y ago
      Your article only suggests that getting vaccinated after infection is still better than not getting vaccinated after infection. The point I made was that vaccination is not more robust than being infected, or at least dont assume it is without solid evidence to support it.
      - kurthr 5y ago
        All of the articles you are referring to are for acute/mild/moderate cases of COVID and do not cover to the significant number (particularly in younger cases) of asymptomatic and still infectious carriers, which I specifically called out in both the first and second post. The whole point is that the adaptive immune system doesn't really ramp up for many days up to weeks, while viral load typically peaks at 3-5 days. That's why the second shot is typically delayed for the MRNA vaccines. A young asymptomatic carrier with a strong innate response who recovers early is unlikely to develop a significant adaptive immune response (e.g. test positive on an antibody serology) thus they are also then very unlikely to develop durable immunity.
    - sreque 5y ago
      https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(21)00203-2 https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37... "Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells". Is that good enough for you?
      - kurthr 5y ago
        Similar to the other article I sited, "we were unable to evaluate immune memory in those with the extreme presentations, both asymptomatic and severe COVID-19" So unfortunately since I specifically and repeatedly referred to asymptomatic cases, which are relatively common in those under 30, it is not good enough. If I could edit my original post to <B>BOLD</B> asymptomatic even more, I would, since I highly doubt you're going to find many studies on that group.

h3cate 5y ago

Are there any links to studies that say antibodies produced from having covid only last 3-6 months?

da_chicken 5y ago
Here's a recent study from this month: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 A quick scan says: * 13% of those with natural immunity "lost detectable IgG titers" after 10 months * Protection durability from the vaccine is still mostly unknown, but appears to be good for 2-3 years My anecdote is from 8 months ago, so I'm not surprised the data has been revised. I got my first dose of the vaccine less than a week after I'd recovered, which at the time was the recommendation of the CDC and health department. Less than three weeks after my first dose, they revised that to have people wait six to eight weeks.
- h3cate 5y ago
  Strange as vaccines were only starting to be rolled out 5 months ago and yet my country and already starting booster shots next month
  - da_chicken 5y ago
    Did your country do a staged rollout where healthcare workers, the elderly, and the infirm were vaccinated first? That's how I got mine in January. I work at a public K-12, where our staff were vaccinated in Phase 1b.
    - h3cate 5y ago
      Yes frontline staff started getting them around January but the elderly are the ones getting the boosters over here and that was around March time if my memory serves correctly
AndrewBissell 5y ago
The myopic focus on antibody levels is misplaced. We know that for Covid there are much broader forms of immune response which are not captured by antibody titers and are quite long lasting.

WoodenChair 5y ago

> They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months I'm sorry about your experience. Having Covid sucks. But your anecdotal data here is inaccurate at best, especially since it was from pre-Delta variant (you said December 2020 was your time of this happening) and we do have studies from that time showing how robust immunity was for those who had natural infections: "Available scientific data suggests that in most people immune responses remain robust and protective against reinfection for at least 6-8 months after infection (the longest follow up with strong scientific evidence is currently approximately 8 months)." [0] No offense, but these kind of anecdotal reports that "someone said" (even a health official), which sound authoritative because of the context, are how misinformation spreads. 0: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-2019-nCoV-Sci-Brief-Natural-immunity-2021.1-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-...

da_chicken 5y ago
While my figure of 3-6 months has been revised upward to 6, 8 or 10 months, the core sentiment of my post remains unchanged: Vaccine immunity is believed to be better. Vaccines are still believed to be good for 2-3 years based on how similar vaccines for other coronaviruses have worked. That is either enough time for the immune system's natural protection to atrophy, or for the virus to change. That still means vaccine immunity is likely to be more robust protection than natural immunity, even though the general sentiment seems to be a shrug for how long protection from the vaccine will actually last. [0] That's why they still exclusively discuss being fully vaccinated, and discount natural immunity. They believe it's better. Furthermore, I have seen no-one in the health community that has recommended not getting the vaccine if you've already had the virus. Compare this to, for example, chicken pox, where they only recommend the vaccine if you haven't had it. In the context of this thread where the comment I was responding to was trying to argue that natural immunity is being short-changed somehow, I think the sentiment I'm expressing is perfectly accurate regardless of how exact timelines have been shifted in the past year. You still need to get fully vaccinated even if you've had the disease. Nothing about that has changed. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 -- This study was published this month

krona 5y ago

The vaccine will prime your immunity to one (important) protein. Natural infection could prime your immunity to up to 29 proteins. I'm not sure 'robustness' right word in the context of rapidly evolving variants.

wang_li 5y ago
According to data from Israel, immunity from having gotten the infection is much better at stopping the delta variant by a factor of around 7x. Other research shows that natural immunity is long lasting. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4
- shkkmo 5y ago
  That's not what that study shows.
  - wang_li 5y ago
    The link is for the second sentence. To quote from the abstract: > Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans. As far as the reports from Israel: > By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      > The link is for the second sentence. Gotcha, that was not at all clear from your comment. Thanks for providing a citation for the other claims, I'll take a look at it.

majkinetor 5y ago

> Vaccine protection is much more robust. This is insane. No vaccine works better then natural protection from real stuff - simply because its less stressful to the body and more stress equals better immunity. I have nothing against vaccines in general but this is nothing but pharma propaganda.

newbamboo 5y ago

Neither you nor the parent are paying attention to recent science. Natural immunity lasts longer than the current vaccines. And it’s likely the virus will escape the current vaccines over a long enough timeline. That’s not a problem if we can roll out new vaccines quickly enough to stay in front of new mutations. But that’s an if. This is the reason Fauci and others who understand the science are focusing on treatments.

newbamboo 5y ago
Here’s the source for my claims. Still preprint but the best (only randomized) study to date. https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/covid-19-infection-survey/results/new-studies https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/covid-19/covid-19-infection-survey/...