Natural immunity, still strong and durable 20 months later (no boosters needed)

Handy!: A group at John Hopkin checked 295 people who had caught Covid before (and tested positive). Amazingly, all but 2 of them still had antibodies and there was “no indication” that the antibodies were declining.

Natural immunity doesn’t always work this well. There are plenty of diseases where protection waves after six months, like RSV, or Norovirus, and many common cold coronaviruses.

Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times

Protection against the virus that causes COVID-19 among the recovered was detected by researchers at 20 months post-infection, adding to the body of evidence that such protection, known as natural immunity, is long-lasting.

Researchers found antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) in 99 percent of study participants who tested positive for COVID-19, with some having had the illness as long as 20 months prior.

“The major takeaway is that natural immunity … is strong and durable,” [Dr Dorry] Segev told The Epoch Times in an email.

Dr. Dorry Segev, the director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at Johns Hopkins University.

There were three groups involved in the study. Of the 295 people who “thought they had had Covid” about half of them actually had. And of 246 who thought they “had never had Covid” 10% appear to have had an asymptomatic infection.

There has been many anecdotes of reinfections with Covid, which doesn’t gel easily with this stuydy. Perhaps some antibodies are just not protective? Cross protection between variants may be a hit and miss thing.

These results just mean people still have antibodies to whatever strain they caught. That’s good, but doesn’t mean they will be protected against other strains of Covid. Nor does this result necessarily apply to the very high risk, or old or immunocompromized, who weren’t in the study.

It is nonetheless, indisputably better than immunity generated by vaccines.