Are you able to become immune to coronavirus?
As the number of people infected with coronavirus is more than 450,000, scientists are currently wrestling with questions that are left after people recover from the virus. Do people survive the infection become immune to the virus?
The answer is luckily, yes but there are some significant unknowns with that as well.
As growing immunity in the community is also the way the pandemic ends, scientists are working overtime to figure out what these significant unknowns are and how they’ll impact the larger community.
It is currently unclear how long people who have been infected and beaten the virus are left with an immunity against it, with some medical professionals believing that there may be an immunity of at least one to two years.
Florian Krammer, a microbiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, says that even if people became reinfected, the second bout of coronavirus would likely be much milder than the first.
“You probably would make a good immune response before you even become symptomatic again and might really blunt the course of the disease,” Dr. Krammer said to The New York Times.
Antibody tests are being used in Singapore, China and a handful of other countries. However, they are just making their way into the West. Antibody tests are the quickest way to assess immunity, as it’s a blood test that looks for protective antibodies in the blood of people who have recovered.
“No matter who makes them, as long as they’re reliable, that’s a super nice tool,” Dr. Krammer said. Because this is a new coronavirus, the test should deliver “basically, a yes or no answer, like an H.I.V. test — you can figure out who was exposed and who wasn’t.”
Dr Krammer’s tests pick up an antibody response as early as three days after symptoms emerge, but given people might not show symptoms for as long as 14 days after infection, it’s too late for the test to be useful as a diagnostic tool.
Ultimately, it’s only with the tests that scientists are using that they will be able to say when enough of the population has become infected and therefore has made people immune.