Coronavirus: Was Sweden right?
Study suggests 'significantly higher' Covid-19 immunity Michael Daly 15:01, Jul 02 2020 ITN Britain's Director of Health Improvement, Professor John Newton, says that the science on coronavirus immunity "is still uncertain".
A new study in Sweden is raising hopes immunity to Covid-19 among the public is “probably significantly higher” than has been suggested by the results of testing for antibodies of the disease.
Sweden has taken a less stringent approach than many other countries to restricting the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
The Swedish approach has widely been described as herd immunity, although the country’s health officials don’t describe it that way.
Jonas Ekstromer/TT News Agency via AP Sweden's Minister for Health and Social Affairs Lena Hallengren, centre, looks on as health worker Gun Bjorling administers a Covid-19 test at a drive-in-test station in Alvsjo, Stockholm (file image).
Those who developed COVID-19 were much more likely to die within a month than people without cancer who got it, two studies found.
(/National Institutes of Health via AP) The researchers analysed samples from 203 people and said their results indicated roughly twice as many people had developed Covid-19 immunity through T-cells, than had developed detectable antibodies.
T-cells are a type of white blood cell specialised in recognising virus-infected cells, and are an essential part of the immune system.
In those with milder symptoms it was not always possible to detect an antibody response, but many still showed a marked T-cell response.
T-cell immunity was also found in people who had no Covid-19 symptoms but who had been exposed to family members known to be infected.
T-cell analyses were more complicated to perform than antibody tests and only done in specialised laboratories, the release said.
“Our results indicate that public immunity to Covid-19 is probably significantly higher than antibody tests have suggested,” Professor Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren, from the Centre for Infectious Medicine at the Karolinska Institutet, and a co-senior author of the study, said.
”If this is the case, it is of course very good news from a public health perspective.” AL JAZEZERA California, Texas and many other US states have reported record increases in new coronavirus cases.
An on the server bioRxiv, and has yet to be peer reviewed.
The article said that without a vaccine for Covid-19, it was critical to determine whether exposed and infected people – specially those without symptoms or only very mild forms of the disease – developed robust immunity.
The T-cell response to Sars-CoV-2 was similar to the reaction seen to successful vaccines for other infections, the report said.