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November 6, 2020 12:10 am

The T-Cell Immune Response To COVID-19 Lasts At Least Six Months

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Over the past year, many reports have shown rapidly waning levels of covid-specific antibodies after the initial burst caused by an infection. [...] Yet antibodies tell only part of the story. Another important actor is the T-cell. Rather than attacking viruses directly, T-cells attack infected cells, to stop the virus reproducing. The balance of importance of the antibody and T-cell arms of the immune system varies with the illness in question. And, as far as this particular infection is concerned, although almost all patients who catch SARS-CoV-2 are thought to create T-cells in response, an understanding of their significance has been elusive. This is largely because T-cells are harder to measure than antibodies, and so are less often studied. Shamez Ladhani, a consultant epidemiologist with Public Health England, a government health-protection agency, who has worked on a new, long-term investigation of these cells, says it took nearly three weeks to count them in the 100 patients his study looked at. The effort was worthwhile, though, because it has shed new light on how long-lasting this form of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 might be. Dr Ladhani's project is part of a wider effort focused on health-care workers that Public Health England began in March. Over 2,000 people have donated blood samples every month since then. The 100 he and his colleagues have studied are a subset of these. In a paper just published as a preprint, but not yet peer reviewed, they say that six months after infection all of these patients, even those who had had only mild symptoms, or none at all, still had detectable levels of T-cells directed against the virus. Though their antibodies might have vanished, T-cells remained on the scene. These findings bode well for the idea that T-cells offer long-term protection against reinfection.

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