overed from Covid-19, 23 who had become ill from SARS and 18 who had never been exposed to either SARS or Covid-19 …
Half of patients in the group with no exposure to either Covid-19 or SARS possessed T-cells which showed immune response to the animal betacoronaviruses, Covid-19 and SARS. This suggested patients’ immunity developed after exposure to common colds caused by betacoronavirus or possibly from other as yet unknown pathogens.”
Frunutta Zinc 5 mg + V... Buy New $14.99 ($0.17 / Count) (as of 05:10 EDT - Details) In other words, if you’ve beat a common cold caused by a OC43 or HKU1 betacoronavirus in the past, you may have a 50/50 chance of having defensive T-cells that can recognize and help defend against SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. According to the researchers:13
“These findings demonstrate that virus-specific memory T-cells induced by betacoronavirus infection are long-lasting, which supports the notion that Covid-19 patients would develop long-term T-cell immunity. Our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that infection with related viruses can also protect from or modify the pathology caused by SARS-Cov-2.”
Other Studies Show Similar Results
Other studies have also discovered that many appear to have prior resistance to SARS-CoV-2. For example, a study14 published May 14, 2020, in the journal Cell, found 70% of samples obtained by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology from patients who had recovered from mild cases of COVID-19, as well as 40% to 60% of people who had not been exposed to the virus, had resistance to SARS-CoV-2 on the T-cell level.
According to the authors, this suggests there’s “cross-reactive T cell recognition between circulating ‘common cold’ coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2.” Like Bertoletti’s study above, the Cell study found that exposure to coronaviruses responsible for the common cold appear to allow your immune system to recognize and fight off SARS-CoV-2 as well.
May 14, 2020, Science magazine reported15 these Cell findings, drawing parallels to another earlier paper16 by German investigators that had come to a similar conclusion.
That German paper,17 the preprint of which was posted April 22, 2020, on Medrxiv, found helper T cells that targeted the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in 15 of 18 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. As reported by Science:18
“The teams also asked whether people who haven’t been infected with SARS-CoV-2 also produce cells that combat it. Thiel and colleagues19 analyzed blood from 68 uninfected people and found that 34% hosted helper T cells that recognized SARS-CoV-2.
The La Jolla team20 detected this crossreactivity in about half of stored blood samples collected between 2015 and 2018, well before the current pandemic began …
The results suggest ‘one reason that a large chunk of the population may be able to deal with the virus is that we may have some small residual immunity from our exposure to common cold viruses,’ says viral immunologist Steven Varga of the University of Iowa. However, neither of the studies attempted to establish that people with crossreactivity don’t become as ill from COVID-19.
Before these studies, researchers didn’t know whether T cells played a role in eliminating SARS-CoV-2, or even whether they could provoke a dangerous immune system overreaction. ‘These papers are really helpful because they start to define the T cell component of the immune response,’ [Columbia University virologist Angela] Rasmussen says.”
Statistician Believes Majority Are Resistant to COVID-19
Life Enhancement Ultra... Buy New $14.99 ($0.12 / Count) (as of 04:34 EDT - Details) These studies add support to the latest COVID-19 mortality models suggesting widespread resistance and prior immunity. Freddie Sayers, executive editor of UnHerd, recently interviewed professor Karl Friston, a statistician whose expertise is mathematical modeling, who believes prior immunity across the global population might be as high as 80%. Sayers reports:21
“[Friston] invented the now standard ‘statistical parametric mapping’ technique for understan