I have been saying this since July (YES I AM PROBABLY IMMUNE), when the first good papers on the topic came out. Also, it has been apparent that NYC, for example, would be having another massive outbreak if nobody got immunity. This is literally how everything works.
If one person says to me, 'Well, you just never know...' I will blow a gasket. We do know! That is what science is for!
(Vaccines are still a good idea. Herd immunity doesn't exist as long as people are being born.)
Not being a biological-scientist, I'm finding the terminology in those papers a tad overwhelming! But very interesting, and thank you for the links. Most of the information splatted at the general public (in the UK) has been along the lines of "immunity to the common cold doesn't last, and it's a coronavirus, therefore..."; or "antibodies disappear after 3-6 months, therefore...". It's good to read some rather more detailed information. I now need a better understanding of T-cells though.
ReplyDeleteWell, the tl;dr version is that immunity is a combination of memory cells, and that although in this case antibody titres do wane over 3-6 months, there's enough of a memory response that even most people who get re-infected are okay (this is the difference between sterilizing immunity and simply functional immunity.) Also: if you don't ever get immunity from BEING INFECTED, we probably don't get a vaccine, that's also not how any of this works.
DeleteThere is also a reinfection tracker, demonstrating that yes, if you run an experiment 100 million+ times, you will in fact collect all the outliers (https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-tracker/)
T cells are ridiculously complex! I did a special-topics lecture on viruses and vaccines for my class and I had to read about them for a week just to make any sense at all.