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How do people resist COVID infections? Hospital workers offer a hint
Data from dozens of UK health-care workers suggest a tantalizing possibility: that some people can clear a nascent SARS-CoV-2 infection from their bodies so quickly that they never test positive for the virus nor even produce antibodies against it1. The data also suggest that such resistance is conferred by immune players called memory T cells — possibly those produced after exposure to coronaviruses that cause the common cold.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s really surprising that the T cells might be able to control an infection so quickly,” says Shane Crotty, an immunologist at La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, who was not involved in the research.
But the study’s authors strongly caution that their results do not show that people who have had the common cold are protected against COVID-19. And the authors also acknowledge that their findings have many caveats, meaning that it’s too early to say with certainty that people can stop an infection in its tracks. The search for people who never get COVID
In the study, published on 10 November in Nature, the authors examined blood samples collected in the first weeks of the pandemic from nearly 60 UK health-care workers. All worked in hospitals, putting them at high risk of contracting COVID-19, but never tested positive or produced any antibodies to the virus for four months after enrolling in the study.
The researchers noticed that in 20 of these ‘seronegative’ participants, T cells had multiplied — a sign that the immune system might be gearing up to fight an infection. Nineteen of these individuals also had increased levels of an immune-system protein called IFI27, which the authors say might be an early marker of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The authors say that these data are evidence for ‘abortive infections’, meaning that the virus made an incursion into the body but failed to take hold.
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Nature 599, 543 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03110-4
References
Swadling, L. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04186-8 (2021).
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