Probably a number of you have seen this item in the NYT coronavirus update today:
“Antibodies may last only two months, especially in people who didn’t show symptoms, a new study finds.” www.nytimes.com/...
Actual paper in Nature Medicine (if you have access): www.nature.com/…
This study emanates from China and studied a group of people who had either left Wuhan and then tested positive, or been in close contact with them. It is a potentially scary — if very tentative — datapoint, suggesting that perhaps immunity won’t last long. But, several caveats.
* I have only skimmed the actual paper (in Nature Medicine); it’s not my field and I’m sure others here would be better prepared to digest this for us
* We don’t know yet how these antibody results will relate to potential for future (re)infection.
* This study involved a super-small number of people — especially of asymptomatic people, only 37 (I think 93 symptomatic), and they were all drawn from a population quarantined due to high exposure/risk.
* It’s possible that people who tested positive but were asymptomatic fought off the virus because of some variable in their immune system (I’d say “strong immune system” but that may not be at all true, and overly strong immune response can also be problematic), and thus wouldn’t be susceptible to future infection either.
* OTOH, it appears unlikely that these asymptomatic folks had false positive covid tests the first time, as the article claims to show viral shedding in these individuals persisting for a median of 14 days (although, they didn’t verify that the virus was present in respiratory specimens).
Anyone (qualified) care to shed more light on this one?