Professor Francois Balloux did a series of tweets summarizing the substantial amount of new evidence that has become available in the last few weeks about immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Francois Balloux is the Director of the UCL Genetics Institute, and a Professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College London. He earned a Master's degree in 1996 and a Doctorate in 2000 from the University of Lausanne. He then completed postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh.
This is the link to the first tweet in a series of 13 about the latest research and this is a link to the rolled up version in a single webpage for easy viewing.
The main discussion is about the way our body’s immune system responds to fighting off the virus and what immunities we have after recovering. It is one of the few times I’ve seen T-cell immunity discussed as most articles focus only on antibody immunity.
The new things I got from this about the latest research:
- “Though, T-cell immunity is essential for controlling an infection and reducing symptoms. #SARSCoV2 seems to elicit robust T-cell response even in asymptomatic/mild patients. There is also evidence for widespread cross-immunity with 'common cold' coronaviruses.”
- “While there is still no established case of #SARSCoV2 reinfection to date, it is likely those will be observed soon due to fairly fast waning antibodies. Though, anyone with a prior exposure to #SARSCoV2 is expected to experience far less severe symptoms upon reinfection.”
- “Most 'hight-tech' vaccines tend to focus on eliciting narrow antibody responses. T-cell response works best against the whole viral diversity. This raises the question whether there should not be more efforts towards 'traditional' vaccines (i.e. attenuated/inactivated).”
The highlighting is mine for the things I found most interesting/new.