According to a study by chinese, the people who have been infected by the new coronavirus have their antibodies strongly decrease two months after their recovery.
In this investigation, published Thursday in Nature Medicine, the researchers warn of the risks to set up “passports of immunity” which would be expected to ensure that their holders are protected against the disease.
The study describes the immunological and clinical, the cases of 37 people without symptoms whose infection has been diagnosed by a virologic test (RT-PCR nasopharyngeal swab) in the district of Wanzhou (south-west of China) by the 10th of April last.
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Out of the 37 asymptomatic patients, 22 were women and 15 men, aged from 8 to 75 years.
The authors Have Long Hua of the medical University of Chongqing and his colleagues, have found that these patients put in isolation in hospital had a median duration of viral excretion of 19 days compared to 14 days in 37 patients with symptoms (fever, cough, shortness of breath…). The duration of excretion is not equivalent, however, an infectivity which remains to be assessed.
Eight weeks after leaving the hospital, the levels of neutralizing antibodies, which confer a priori immunity against the virus, had decreased in 81.1% of patients without symptoms, compared to 62,2% in symptomatic patients.
continue searching “for any emergency”
To further elucidate the immune response, the researchers measured certain substances (cytokines and chemokines) in the blood and observed their low levels in asymptomatic patients, showing an inflammatory response reduced. “We have observed that the rate of IgG and neutralizing antibodies in a high proportion of people who have recovered from an infection with SARS-CoV-2 begin to decrease within 2 to 3 months after infection,” added the scientists.
These data, together with previous analyses of neutralizing antibodies, highlight the potential risks of the use of “passports of immunity” and plead in favour of public health interventions (social distancing, hygiene, isolation of high-risk groups, screening for generalized), according to the authors.
They advocate for further research “urgently” on larger groups of patients with and without symptoms to determine the duration of immunity from antibodies.
In spite of the small number of patients, “this corresponds to some of the concerns according to which the natural immunity to the coronavirus may be short-lived,” according to the professor of immunology british Danny Altmann, who was not involved in this study.
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