The conclusion, announced this Friday, is expected to settle about 51 million people worldwide, particularly those infected in recent months. “This is very good news, because we can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who have had Covid-19 will not contract it again,” commented David Eyre, professor in Oxford’s Nuffield Department for Human Health , who co-produced the study.
Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization for pandemics, also welcomed the study’s disclosure. “We are seeing sustained immune responses among human populations, so far,” he commented. “It also gives us hope about the vaccine.”
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Maria van Kerkhove, who technically leads the WHO to fight coronavirus, said that “we will still have to follow these people for a long period of time to see how long their immunity lasts”.
The study appears to counter on a large scale some isolated occurrences of reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 that have already been recorded and which admitted the possibility that immunity to coronavirus was short-lived and that recovered patients could fall ill again in a short time.
The cases of reinfection should remain a possibility but rare, the study indicates.
During the investigation, 89 of the 11,052 people without antibodies studied, developed a new infection without symptoms, something that did not occur with any of the 1,246 with antibodies analyzed. These employees were also less likely to test positive for Covid-19 without symptoms, with 76 without antibodies testing positive compared to just three among those who already had immunity. Even these three are all well and have had no symptoms, the researchers said.
The study continues.
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