Coronavirus is known to affect some more severely than others. This often comes down to a variety of factors including age and underlying health issues such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Much confusion still lies as to why some countries have had less cases of death from COVID-19 than others. Could an immune defender be the reason to this?
The immune system’s memory of the new coronavirus lingers for at least six months in most people, it has been reported.
Although SARS-CoV-2 can be deadly, it has mild-mannered cousins called seasonal coronaviruses that are among the causes of the common cold.
Some scientists have suggested people might be shielded from SARS-CoV-2 infection if they have recently been infected by a seasonal coronavirus.
Researchers have found participants’ immune responses varied widely.
Persistent immune defenders were memory B cells, which jump-start antibody production when a pathogen is re-encountered, and two important classes of T cells.
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Scientists have found antibodies that recognize SARS-CoV-2 in the blood of people who have never caught the virus.
Children are particularly likely to harbour such antibodies, which might explain why most infected children have either mild illness or none at all.
Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute in London found that roughly 5 percent of 302 uninfected adult participants had antibodies that recognize SARS-CoV-2 while younger individuals aged between six and sixteen had 60 percent
It has been unclear whether previous infection with one of the ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses which cause the common cold wards off SARS-CoV-2 or its severe symptoms.
The team’s estimate of antibody prevalence in Kenya is similar to an earlier estimate for the level in Spain.
However, Spain had more than 28,000 death cases by early July, whereas Kenya had lost 341 by the end of the same month.
The authors write the “sharp contrast” between Kenya’s antibody prevalence and its COVID-19 deaths hints that the coronavirus’s effects are dampened in Africa.
The reason for the lower death rates could include several factors, including age distribution, underlying chronic disease levels, and immune system priming, as to why the spread and severity of COVID-19 in much of Africa is different than that observed in Europe or the Americas, as reported in the study published in Science entitled COVID-19 in Africa: Dampening the storm.