Russian scientists have discovered immunity to COVID-19 in non-sick people
The immune system of the human body, which has not previously encountered a new type of coronavirus infection, in some cases reacts to this disease as if it were previously familiar.
Izvestia writes about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, citing a study by scientists from the Federal State Budgetary Institution National Medical Research Center for Hematology of the Russian Ministry of Health.
“Most people who have recovered from COVID-19 have antibodies to the virus. But in some patients this immune response is completely absent. Destroying the virus in their body could have come at the expense of another part of the immune system - T-lymphocytes, or T-cells. In most infected people, these cells are actually able to recognize fragments of the virus. […] Moreover, it turned out that people who have not had COVID-19 also have T cells that respond to SARS-CoV-2,” the article notes.
In their study, the scientists described two types of immune responses to the new coronavirus: antibodies and T-cell responses. They looked at biomaterials from those who had recovered from COVID-19 (31 samples), those who were not sick (14), as well as samples from the biobank that were taken before the pandemic (10). It turned out that in the blood taken in the spring of 2020 from those who did not suffer COVID-19, there were significantly more T cells that recognized the virus than in samples from the biobank. The study authors explain it this way: among those who did not get sick, some probably still had time to encounter the virus.
At the same time, the first author of the article, a participant in RSF grants, an employee of the National Medical Research Center for Hematology, Alina Shomuradova, admitted that researchers do not fully understand the nature of this immune response.
“The T-cell response can be observed due to the fact that immunological memory cells are activated to other coronaviruses that existed around us before 2019. Or, for example, these people actually suffered from COVID-19 asymptomatically and did not develop antibodies to the virus,” says Shomuradova.
At the same time, those who had a negative PCR test result were considered not sick at work, the researchers emphasized. That is, it cannot be ruled out that in fact the number of people who have recovered from the disease may be significantly higher than official data.
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