the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, according to Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology published (preprint) results from a study on longer-term immunity against SARS-CoV-2 conferred by natural infection. The study evaluated 185 individuals with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection. All participants, and the majority experienced COVID-19 disease but were not hospitalized. Most of the participants provided a single blood sample between 6 and 240 days after symptom onset, with 41 collected at least 6 months after symptom onset. A subset of 38 participants provided multiple samples over a period of several months. The researchers found that antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 were relatively stable and memory B cells were abundant after 6 months, leading to optimism that immunity against the virus could mitigate the risk of severe COVID-19 disease for “many years.”
