A Change in the Dialogue on COVID-19

The new world that we have been asked, and in some places through heavy-handed measures, told to live may change for the better considering the recent study published by Nature Magazine. Researchers find the presence of T-Cell immunity in all the patients who have recovered from COVID-19 reflect an immune response that is more achievable and more common than the discussion on antibody accumulation.

The abstract provides the most succinct knowledge about the T-Cell counts with presence of CD4 and CD8 T-Cells in all 36 patients. 23 of the SARS-CoV recovered patients long-lasting memory T-Cells that were reactive to the original SARS almost 17 years ago, and in uninfected donors, specific T-Cells reflected protein fragments from a ‘common cold’ could be cross-reactive with SARS-CoV-2 (Le Bert et al.). In a way saying if you have had a common cold and recently, you have a T-Cell response to COVID-19.

I have advocated for a herd immunity to combat the pandemic, and perhaps what this study shows is that we had herd immunity before we even knew about COVID-19. The article has limitations in saying that betacoronaviruses could have more long-lasting T-Cell proteins compared to the common cold proteins which makes sense considering any one person could be subject to the common cold once or twice a year, but this may provide the most clear evidence to the lethality of the virus and question the methodology behind battling viruses now and in the future. This could also provide an answer to the mortality and people succeptable to COVID-19. We have been consistently hearing the most vulnerable are the elderly and immunocomprimized; well, Woods, Iuliano and Walker (2013) suggest that elderly patients and individuals with symptoms related to chronic disease such as poor diet and being overweight saw a low count in CD4 T-Cell proteins, this could be explanatory since anecdotally the mortality rate from COVID-19 heavily skews towards the elderly population.

This could be a paradigm shift away from gloves, masks, sanitizers, and lockdowns; to strengthening immune systems through more contact with the outside world.

References

Le Bert, N. et al. (2020). SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z_reference.pdf

Woods, J. L., Iuliano-Burns, S., & Walker, K. Z. (2013). Immunological and nutritional factors in elderly people in low-level care and their association with mortality. Immunity & Ageing, 10, 32. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3751476/