Patients with mild symptoms do not have long-term immunity against the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, according to a new study by Chinese military scientists.
The new discovery “will lay the foundation for rationally designing effective vaccines”, said Ye and colleagues in a non-peer-reviewed paper posted on medrxiv.org on Monday. Whether or for how long the induced immune protection could last remains an open question, though. An increasing number of studies suggest that some infected patients quickly lose antibodies.
The researchers noticed an increase of “helper” and “killer” T cells in these patients, however. These T cells are another type of immune cells that can attack foreign intruders, but they are not specifically targeting Sars-CoV-2. Ye suspected that they were remnants of previous infections caused by other types of coronavirus that resulted in common flu.
In either case, the patients’ immune response was incomplete, Ye and his colleagues said. The B and T cells usually need to work together to fend off a viral attack. White House Covid-19 adviser Dr Scott Atlas has argued that infection of low-risk groups such as young people would not lead to more deaths.
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