7 ms·

We know why some people got Covid while others didn't

52 points by wglb 2y ago

throwaway211 2y ago
My next question is, who has the gene HLA-DQA2 and why.
- gonzo 2y ago
  Parkinson's disease-associated SNP4 is correlated (r2=0.95) with variants that are associated with HLA-DQA2 expression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/3118#:~:text=HLA%2DDQA2%20and%20HLA%2DDQB2,associated%20with%20HLA%2DDQA2%20expression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/3118#:~:text=HLA%2DDQA2%20....
  - pheatherlite 2y ago
    Dang... safe from covid but at what cost
    - devbent 2y ago
      This is how genes like that evolve. Keeps you alive at 30, kills you at 70. You got to reproduce so it counts as a win for evolution!
dchichkov 2y ago
Understanding better this defense mechanism could allow us to understand even better of how it can be breached and design ... oh, wait...
metadat 2y ago
Maybe this explains how I haven't gotten it yet despite being in proximity repeatedly (living with) someone who was positive, as well as being in groups where I was the only one who didn't end up with it. Fascinating. I thought maybe I was resistant because I drink so much water, haha.
- 7bit 2y ago
  > I thought maybe I was resistant because I drink so much water, haha. I hope that was a joke.
  - metadat 2y ago
    ^^ Obviously it's very unlikely to have significant effect, my family was amused because it's the only obvious thing I do differently from most people.
- 8fingerlouie 2y ago
  You may have had it and just never noticed it. My wife tested positive, and as a precaution i went in for a test as well. Turns out i also had COVID-19, but during the week or so i tested positive, i didn't feel as much as a slight fever. There were litteraly zero symptoms. My wife also had a pretty mild case, although it was more like a bad cold, and the kids had the same experience as me, zero symptoms.
  - metadat 2y ago
    I considered this, but tested frequently, always negative. It also would've been likely I'd have transmitted it to someone and heard they got sick after I was with them.
  - fred_is_fred 2y ago
    I had the opposite. My wife and I sat in front of a lady hacking and blowing her nose on a 6 hour flight. A few days later my wife was sick and tested positive after 2 days. I was sick a day later, same symptoms, and never tested positive once after 3 tries. Possible we were sick at the same time with the same exposure with 2 different things? Maybe? But unlikely to me since we'd been on vacation together and to the same places for the last 10 days. Both of us were in the mild symptoms/cold symptoms range, so I also wonder if a home test just wasn't sensitive enough for me to test positive on for some reason.
m463 2y ago
I wonder if any of the Not Infected group were kindergarten teachers. I knew someone who - at the start of being a teacher - got sick. Then at some point her body adjusted to the constant exposure to sniffly kids and she never got sick.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  Her body didn’t “adjust”. She just built immunity against all of the common illnesses. We went through the same thing when we sent our two to daycare. Just constantly sick for the first year/
  - leephillips 2y ago
    I might describe the acquisition of immunity as a body adjusting.
    - maxerickson 2y ago
      Which fine, but it's not really clear that is what the other poster meant. I'm presuming they have the common understanding of immunity to infectious disease of course.
  - wruza 2y ago
    You can’t build immunity against cold and flu, afaiu, and I doubt that “constantly sick” meant measles, chickenpox, etc. How does that work? Edit: am I wrong here? Would like to know.
    - SkyPuncher 2y ago
      You're right that you can't build immunity to everything, but you do build immunity to a lot of stuff - namely many of the viruses that are colloquially called "a cold". Flu, Measles, Chickenpox and several others are best handled with vaccination. My point was namely that your body doesn't actually "adjust". It doesn't reduce your symptoms or change your baseline response to a virus. You start getting fewer illnesses because you've encountered the most common ones that come around in your environment.
mike_hearn 2y ago
It's painful, watching history be rewritten. > Throughout the pandemic, one of the key questions on everyone’s mind was why some people avoided getting COVID, while others caught the virus multiple times. It was not on everyone's mind. It was the exact opposite: pre-existing immunity was one of the many things that was officially forbidden to notice. The party line was that because SARS-CoV-2 was "novel", 100% of the population would become infected upon exposure. I have very clear memories of telling lockdown-obsessed people that the models assumed a 100% susceptibility rate yet the Diamond Princess outbreak had showed this was far from true, so the modeling justifying lockdowns was wrong. The response was usually derisive. Who are you, rando programmer, to challenge expert epidemiologists? Another case that sticks in the mind: I was having dinner with some work colleagues. They were complaining about getting COVID repeatedly post-vaccination, and reacted with amazement when I told them I'd never had COVID and also never been vaccinated. One suggested I should report myself to the authorities so they could test me and find out how I could possibly be immune despite having never been sick. I laughed and said no, I'm not going to do that. Cue appalled expressions. How could you not want to help? Well, there are lots of people who have prior immunity, this has been known for years and the authorities have deliberately ignored us because they ignore anything they don't understand and thus can't model <bafflement, shock>. Note that the nasal spray challenge study they talk about was done in 2022. Their citation for their claim that pre-existing immunity was previously "unproven" actually goes to a study of healthcare workers from 2021 which begins "Individuals with potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2 do not necessarily develop PCR or antibody positivity, suggesting that some individuals may clear subclinical infection before seroconversion." Although they didn't understand the exact mechanism, the wrongness of the public health assumptions was well known at the time by the relevant people and they said nothing.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I agree with most of what you said, but most people I know didn't assume or believe that exposure automatically meant infection. At the very least, we all found this out empirically very early on. Someone would get COVID and then text everyone they'd been in proximity with (even masked, 6 feet away, etc.) for the past week or so to let them know. Only a small percentage of the people exposed ended up getting sick in most of those instances. And even in cases where a decent percentage of people got sick (say someone had an indoor gathering that wasn't well ventilated), it was never 100%. Sure, some of that was probably due to masking and distancing sometimes being effective. But most people I know intuitively got the idea that sometimes your body can fight off certain amounts of the virus, and you never actually become infected enough to test positive or show symptoms. And yeah, there were some people who I didn't see at all for like 3 years. While I may have thought that was a bit much, that was their comfort level, so... so be it.
bitnasty 2y ago
Interesting but n=16 is a weak ass study
- oneing 2y ago
  Smaller study sizes are ok if the effect is large.
- ebiester 2y ago
  This wasn't a double blind trial. This was a "Do something and watch the results" activity. And consider this: "In these people, we were able to identify cells stimulated by a key antiviral defence response in both the nose and the blood. This response, called the “interferon” response, is one of the ways our bodies signal to our immune system to help fight off viruses and other infections. We were surprised to find that this response was detected in the blood before it was detected in the nose, suggesting that the immune response spreads from the nose very quickly." This told us that one of our hypotheses about the virus was invalid. You don't need a lot of volunteers for that.
- taeric 2y ago
  I don't think your point is invalid; but as the siblings point out, sample size effectiveness really depends quite heavily on many factors. As an obvious/naive example, you wouldn't need a lot of participants to know that an acute poison is, well, poisonous. As you get ones with less of an acute effect, though, the number of participants needed goes up. Similarly, they did controlled and deliberate exposures here. So, I'm very excited to read follow ons to this study. Looks very promising to my naive eyes.
machmudElcars 2y ago
This is super irrelevant, sorry but the size is just too small
caroliy76 2y ago
[flagged]
- JohnClark1337 2y ago
  [dead]
lagniappe 2y ago
Despite rendering care for those affected and being exposed personally a few times by confirmed positives, I've not had it yet. I wonder why often.
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  Yes you have, everyone on planet earth has "had covid" by now. We have known from a US Navy study early on where they tested and tracked everyone on an aircraft carrier regularly. They found that like 98% of people who tested positive (PCR) never knew they had it or showed any symptoms. Like 99% of people who have "had covid" never even knew that had it, that it how mild of a disease it is. Without a major co-factor covid usually goes unnoticed. My only question is why don't people seem to know what should be common knowledge about covid at this point?
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Seven billion people, seven hundred million recorded cases, seven million deaths. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (long covid is not accurately recorded, but more prevalent than fatalities)
  - lagniappe 2y ago
    I've never shown positive, while proactively checking with PCR.
  - taeric 2y ago
    You can use some charity to the post, of course. They almost certainly mean "never had symptoms" and likely never tested positive on a test. So, even with your point that excessive testing could have shown that they had it; I think it is clear what they meant. And it is a puzzling situation.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    PCR positivity doesn't mean anything because the test is detecting viral fragments, not live virus. In fact it starts with a lysis stage that destroys whatever virus is in the sample so it can be detected. So there's actually no contradiction between testing positive and never having had COVID, even if you use an invalid definition of COVID (viral presence) rather than a symptom based definition.

52 points by wglb 2y ago

throwaway211 2y ago

My next question is, who has the gene HLA-DQA2 and why.

gonzo 2y ago
Parkinson's disease-associated SNP4 is correlated (r2=0.95) with variants that are associated with HLA-DQA2 expression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/3118#:~:text=HLA%2DDQA2%20and%20HLA%2DDQB2,associated%20with%20HLA%2DDQA2%20expression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/3118#:~:text=HLA%2DDQA2%20....
- pheatherlite 2y ago
  Dang... safe from covid but at what cost
  - devbent 2y ago
    This is how genes like that evolve. Keeps you alive at 30, kills you at 70. You got to reproduce so it counts as a win for evolution!

dchichkov 2y ago

Understanding better this defense mechanism could allow us to understand even better of how it can be breached and design ... oh, wait...

metadat 2y ago

Maybe this explains how I haven't gotten it yet despite being in proximity repeatedly (living with) someone who was positive, as well as being in groups where I was the only one who didn't end up with it. Fascinating. I thought maybe I was resistant because I drink so much water, haha.

7bit 2y ago
> I thought maybe I was resistant because I drink so much water, haha. I hope that was a joke.
- metadat 2y ago
  ^^ Obviously it's very unlikely to have significant effect, my family was amused because it's the only obvious thing I do differently from most people.
8fingerlouie 2y ago
You may have had it and just never noticed it. My wife tested positive, and as a precaution i went in for a test as well. Turns out i also had COVID-19, but during the week or so i tested positive, i didn't feel as much as a slight fever. There were litteraly zero symptoms. My wife also had a pretty mild case, although it was more like a bad cold, and the kids had the same experience as me, zero symptoms.
- metadat 2y ago
  I considered this, but tested frequently, always negative. It also would've been likely I'd have transmitted it to someone and heard they got sick after I was with them.
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  I had the opposite. My wife and I sat in front of a lady hacking and blowing her nose on a 6 hour flight. A few days later my wife was sick and tested positive after 2 days. I was sick a day later, same symptoms, and never tested positive once after 3 tries. Possible we were sick at the same time with the same exposure with 2 different things? Maybe? But unlikely to me since we'd been on vacation together and to the same places for the last 10 days. Both of us were in the mild symptoms/cold symptoms range, so I also wonder if a home test just wasn't sensitive enough for me to test positive on for some reason.

m463 2y ago

I wonder if any of the Not Infected group were kindergarten teachers. I knew someone who - at the start of being a teacher - got sick. Then at some point her body adjusted to the constant exposure to sniffly kids and she never got sick.

SkyPuncher 2y ago
Her body didn’t “adjust”. She just built immunity against all of the common illnesses. We went through the same thing when we sent our two to daycare. Just constantly sick for the first year/
- leephillips 2y ago
  I might describe the acquisition of immunity as a body adjusting.
  - maxerickson 2y ago
    Which fine, but it's not really clear that is what the other poster meant. I'm presuming they have the common understanding of immunity to infectious disease of course.
- wruza 2y ago
  You can’t build immunity against cold and flu, afaiu, and I doubt that “constantly sick” meant measles, chickenpox, etc. How does that work? Edit: am I wrong here? Would like to know.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    You're right that you can't build immunity to everything, but you do build immunity to a lot of stuff - namely many of the viruses that are colloquially called "a cold". Flu, Measles, Chickenpox and several others are best handled with vaccination. My point was namely that your body doesn't actually "adjust". It doesn't reduce your symptoms or change your baseline response to a virus. You start getting fewer illnesses because you've encountered the most common ones that come around in your environment.

mike_hearn 2y ago

It's painful, watching history be rewritten. > Throughout the pandemic, one of the key questions on everyone’s mind was why some people avoided getting COVID, while others caught the virus multiple times. It was not on everyone's mind. It was the exact opposite: pre-existing immunity was one of the many things that was officially forbidden to notice. The party line was that because SARS-CoV-2 was "novel", 100% of the population would become infected upon exposure. I have very clear memories of telling lockdown-obsessed people that the models assumed a 100% susceptibility rate yet the Diamond Princess outbreak had showed this was far from true, so the modeling justifying lockdowns was wrong. The response was usually derisive. Who are you, rando programmer, to challenge expert epidemiologists? Another case that sticks in the mind: I was having dinner with some work colleagues. They were complaining about getting COVID repeatedly post-vaccination, and reacted with amazement when I told them I'd never had COVID and also never been vaccinated. One suggested I should report myself to the authorities so they could test me and find out how I could possibly be immune despite having never been sick. I laughed and said no, I'm not going to do that. Cue appalled expressions. How could you not want to help? Well, there are lots of people who have prior immunity, this has been known for years and the authorities have deliberately ignored us because they ignore anything they don't understand and thus can't model <bafflement, shock>. Note that the nasal spray challenge study they talk about was done in 2022. Their citation for their claim that pre-existing immunity was previously "unproven" actually goes to a study of healthcare workers from 2021 which begins "Individuals with potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2 do not necessarily develop PCR or antibody positivity, suggesting that some individuals may clear subclinical infection before seroconversion." Although they didn't understand the exact mechanism, the wrongness of the public health assumptions was well known at the time by the relevant people and they said nothing.

kelnos 2y ago
I agree with most of what you said, but most people I know didn't assume or believe that exposure automatically meant infection. At the very least, we all found this out empirically very early on. Someone would get COVID and then text everyone they'd been in proximity with (even masked, 6 feet away, etc.) for the past week or so to let them know. Only a small percentage of the people exposed ended up getting sick in most of those instances. And even in cases where a decent percentage of people got sick (say someone had an indoor gathering that wasn't well ventilated), it was never 100%. Sure, some of that was probably due to masking and distancing sometimes being effective. But most people I know intuitively got the idea that sometimes your body can fight off certain amounts of the virus, and you never actually become infected enough to test positive or show symptoms. And yeah, there were some people who I didn't see at all for like 3 years. While I may have thought that was a bit much, that was their comfort level, so... so be it.

bitnasty 2y ago

Interesting but n=16 is a weak ass study

oneing 2y ago
Smaller study sizes are ok if the effect is large.
ebiester 2y ago
This wasn't a double blind trial. This was a "Do something and watch the results" activity. And consider this: "In these people, we were able to identify cells stimulated by a key antiviral defence response in both the nose and the blood. This response, called the “interferon” response, is one of the ways our bodies signal to our immune system to help fight off viruses and other infections. We were surprised to find that this response was detected in the blood before it was detected in the nose, suggesting that the immune response spreads from the nose very quickly." This told us that one of our hypotheses about the virus was invalid. You don't need a lot of volunteers for that.
taeric 2y ago
I don't think your point is invalid; but as the siblings point out, sample size effectiveness really depends quite heavily on many factors. As an obvious/naive example, you wouldn't need a lot of participants to know that an acute poison is, well, poisonous. As you get ones with less of an acute effect, though, the number of participants needed goes up. Similarly, they did controlled and deliberate exposures here. So, I'm very excited to read follow ons to this study. Looks very promising to my naive eyes.

machmudElcars 2y ago

This is super irrelevant, sorry but the size is just too small

caroliy76 2y ago

[flagged]

JohnClark1337 2y ago
[dead]

lagniappe 2y ago

Despite rendering care for those affected and being exposed personally a few times by confirmed positives, I've not had it yet. I wonder why often.

kylebenzle 2y ago
Yes you have, everyone on planet earth has "had covid" by now. We have known from a US Navy study early on where they tested and tracked everyone on an aircraft carrier regularly. They found that like 98% of people who tested positive (PCR) never knew they had it or showed any symptoms. Like 99% of people who have "had covid" never even knew that had it, that it how mild of a disease it is. Without a major co-factor covid usually goes unnoticed. My only question is why don't people seem to know what should be common knowledge about covid at this point?
- pjc50 2y ago
  Seven billion people, seven hundred million recorded cases, seven million deaths. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (long covid is not accurately recorded, but more prevalent than fatalities)
- lagniappe 2y ago
  I've never shown positive, while proactively checking with PCR.
- taeric 2y ago
  You can use some charity to the post, of course. They almost certainly mean "never had symptoms" and likely never tested positive on a test. So, even with your point that excessive testing could have shown that they had it; I think it is clear what they meant. And it is a puzzling situation.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  PCR positivity doesn't mean anything because the test is detecting viral fragments, not live virus. In fact it starts with a lysis stage that destroys whatever virus is in the sample so it can be detected. So there's actually no contradiction between testing positive and never having had COVID, even if you use an invalid definition of COVID (viral presence) rather than a symptom based definition.