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Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

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Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Positive tests, hospitalisations and deaths are highly correlated. How could that be if the test are bullshit?

What do you mean by “highly” correlated? Source? Do a google for “COVID PCR ct cycle threshold” and you’ll come across loads and loads of good articles about how the meaning of a positive PCR test is relative to the cycle threshold.

Basically any country in this list: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Or one from only Belgium with hospital admissions and posivety rate to correct for the amount of tests taken: https://epistat.wiv-isp.be/covid/covid-19.html

Hospital admissions and deaths follow positive tests like clockwork.

Sure it's possible to fuck up pcr tests if you're doing them badly, but there are no indications that that is happening at a significant scale.

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#362
post #86

From my understanding if you had an mRNA vaccine, your body was only exposed to an artificial spike protein, so effectively you have spike specific antibodies. On the other hand, if you had a real infection by the virus, you likely have antibodies for the spike protein and other part of the virus like the shell. So from my layman understanding, the immunity should be more resistant to a mutation of the spike protein.…

I'll admit to not understanding why, but "consensus" seems to be that the vaccine confers greater resistance to variants than does natural immunity- perhaps the natural immunity is over-fit to the one virus, whereas the spike is a necessary component to the whole family? That said, I've also seen oft repeated that what you get is immunity*, aka resistance to the worst symptoms. Mild infections are still to be expecte…

My impression was rather it's consensus that the vaccine provides more predictable immunity, which is the most important thing if you want to set policy. So recommendation in most countries I checked is to get the vaccine, even if you had Covid, cause it's the same dose for each patient and we have much better data on efficacy, whereas immunity from infection is much less predictable and traceable.

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#363
post #86

From my understanding if you had an mRNA vaccine, your body was only exposed to an artificial spike protein, so effectively you have spike specific antibodies. On the other hand, if you had a real infection by the virus, you likely have antibodies for the spike protein and other part of the virus like the shell. So from my layman understanding, the immunity should be more resistant to a mutation of the spike protein.…

> That being said I also know someone who got Covid 2 times, once in march 2020 and once in april 2021. (Confirmed by PCR the 2 times). The second time was much milder, but still she had to stop working for a week (versus one month the first time). It is still possible it was a defective test the second time, and something else than Covid. For what it's worth my girlfriend is currently recovering from her second bout…

My hypothesis is that people who got Covid once and recovered feel safe, thus start doing more risky things and have more exposure to potential Covid carriers.

So the second time the viral load may be much higher, which leads to worse symptoms.

Do you think this is true in your anecdotal experience?

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said I also know someone who got Covid 2 times, once in march 2020 and once in april 2021. (Confirmed by PCR the 2 times). The second time was much milder, but still she had to stop working for a week (versus one month the first time). It is still possible it was a defective test the second time, and something else than Covid. For what it's worth my girlfriend is currently recovering from her second bout…

My hypothesis is that people who got Covid once and recovered feel safe, thus start doing more risky things and have more exposure to potential Covid carriers. So the second time the viral load may be much higher, which leads to worse symptoms. Do you think this is true in your anecdotal experience?

In general that's certainly possible, but I don't think it is in this case. My girlfriend and I were pretty relaxed late last summer (a couple months after she got sick) to early winter when we had low case count, but after that we became very careful again when the cases got high. Since then we've both been very careful.

Her job has just been a bit of a cesspool of cases. It just keeps going around and around and eventually it got her too.

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#365

I am being shunned by my family because of my lack of interest in the vaccine. I've had COVID and recovered. I also don't get a flu shot each year. I really like not putting things into my body, especially when year after year I may or may not "catch" these things but if I do, I always recover. I act responsibly and do not go out when I am sick. However, none of these facts or articles such as this will ever effectiv…

> I look forward to when greater fact-based realities start to take hold again.

Sounds like you ought to start with yourself, to be frank.

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the body cleared the virus, then what it chose is effective whether that’s the spike or the nucleocapsid. It is actually more likely to be robust than vaccine induced immunity. The claims about superiority of vaccine induced immunity that I’ve seen all rely on antibody counts, and in the very short term that may very well be true - but the importance of T-cells is not sufficiently well characterized to say it with…

... which hinges completely on the virus not evolving at all, which is outside of the realm of reality. Evolving a new spike is extremely disadvantageous for the virus. Widespread natural immunity is not enough to prevent a repeat of this this or next year, especially when we have evolutionary hotbeds in countries which could not (or would not) do anything to prevent the spread.

> ... which hinges completely on the virus not evolving at all, which is outside of the realm of reality.

This makes no sense.

If you only only target the spike, you assume the spike doesn't change sufficiently. If you target the entire virus, you assume the entire virus doesn't change sufficiently. As far as I know, mutations are generally assumed to be random. You're effectively matching against a shorter string (spike only), so you're less likely to recognize a mutated virus, than if you match against a longer string (the entire virus) which is what natural immunity targets.

Mutations in the spike (that still keep it effective - and we actually have quite a few of these already) are much more likely to evade the vaccine-induced immunity than they are likely to evade natural immunity.

Mutations only in the nucleocapsid are more likely to evade natural immunity than vaccine-induced immunity, but to a lesser degree - because natural immunity also targets the spike.

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on work from similar coronaviruses, the spike protein was quickly identified at the beginning of the pandemic as an important component for viral binding to the ACE-2 receptor. It is one protein component of the viral shell, but has proven to be an excellent target, given its induced immune response to the mRNA vaccines. Covid will not be able to mutate away from using the spike protein, but it will continue to…

> You may have heard about monoclonal antibody therapies to covid ... those, unfortunately, are very susceptible to mutation because if a critical targeted residue mutates, you could lose all efficacy of the drug. Depends if the therapy works on the virus itself, or your body's response to the infection. I think most of the monoclonal antibodies are working on your body's (over)response, so mutations shouldn't change…

I should have been more clear about the monoclonals I was referring to, which are those targeting the virus itself (1).

You may be thinking of the targeted immune modulators against inflammatory cytokines like TNF-alpha (2) and IL-6 (3). Some of those are antibodies, others are pieces of antibody fused to other proteins. Regardless, those types of treatments would not be affected directly by viral mutation, whereas the first type I described above have already been shown to be less effective with existing mutations (4).

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casirivimab/imdevimab 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casirivimab/imdevimab 3. https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/immunomodulat... 4. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/850

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#368
post #48

If recovered people have longer term protection than vaccinated people (which is one possible interpretation of the headline's statement), would it make sense to first vaccinate someone and then expose them to the real virus, thereby generating the benefits with a much much lower risk or maybe even zero risk?

Why? Make the patient catch Covid… so that they don’t later catch Covid?

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hypothesis is that people who got Covid once and recovered feel safe, thus start doing more risky things and have more exposure to potential Covid carriers. So the second time the viral load may be much higher, which leads to worse symptoms. Do you think this is true in your anecdotal experience?

In general that's certainly possible, but I don't think it is in this case. My girlfriend and I were pretty relaxed late last summer (a couple months after she got sick) to early winter when we had low case count, but after that we became very careful again when the cases got high. Since then we've both been very careful. Her job has just been a bit of a cesspool of cases. It just keeps going around and around and ev…

Another possibility is different variant which is deadlier. However everything is just speculation at this point.

Re: Had Covid? You’ll probably make antibodies for a lifetime

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural immunity was used as a justification for some societal responses, particularly by some on one side of the political spectrum. Thus, some of those on the opposite side will interpret strong natural immunity to COVID-19 as a political loss.

Remember that across the globe, there are many complex political affiliations. As it turns out, the governments that tend to be more authoritarian, such as India, the U.K., or the U.S. during the last cycle, denied the efficacy of wearing masks or getting vaccinated. Boris Johnson went as far as to suggest he get Covid on stage with the cameras rolling, to show the dangers were exaggerated. Now he's well on his way t…

Right wing governments are definitely less authoritarian than left wing ones.

Lockdown in left wing countries has been much worse (as in, you can't get out of this area, you need to wear masks outside) than in the UK or the US.

Tbh I was expecting better from the UK Tories and I wish they didn't implement all these restrictions and gave away so much money - but they did way better than other European countries I have friends in. At the same time, I've seen approval for Boris and Rishi Sunak increase among leftists, probably because they enacted pretty left wing policies.

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