Some of us have not had the virus. Despite the fact that more than two years have passed since the outbreak of a global pandemic, close contact with infected people, extensive testing and increasingly infectious variants of the Corona virus.
In the end, I started to wonder. Is there a reason to be proud of your immune system or is it just luck?
Researchers also ask. They gave us a name: the congregation that was never affected. Others call us Covid virgins.
Are they immune?
At the onset of the pandemic, research focused on infection, disease, vaccine, and procedures. Now more and more researchers are concerned about possible immunity.
Because if someone turns out to be immune, it can be used to fight the coronavirus.
The stories are many. About the person in the family who took care of all the sick, but did not get sick himself. About nurses and doctors in daily contact with the virus who escaped themselves.
Is it luck, caution or genetic differences?
Some scientists do not believe in immunity to the coronavirus. Everyone has to join in – sooner or later.
Also, we may have gotten infected without knowing it. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have heard about asymptomatic COVID-19. We may have passed the virus between two tests or we weren’t tested because we didn’t feel anything on our bodies.
Error or luck?
There is also a possibility that home tests may have shown a false result.
Luck is also a possible explanation. We’ve tested it with other viruses – that everyone in the family gets the flu, but one survives.
It takes some time for you to become infected. A lot of enough virus particles must be sneezed or coughed up by an infected person, which then enters and bypasses the other person’s immune system. Even if we were close to people with the virus, we might not have ingested enough virus to get infected.
Or maybe we only had maximum protection from the vaccine when we hugged patients.
One theory about the uninfected is that we were more cautious and isolated. Scientists could verify this.
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behavior or genetics
They could send out a questionnaire and determine the behavior. What did you do? How careful were you? How many patients have you been out with? How long have you worked at home? How many times did you ride the bus?
It can show the patterns in which the scales operate and what distinguishes the affected from the unaffected.
A problem with this approach is that people do not understand why they are not infected. They have lived with, kissed, cared for, and sat in meetings with infected people. They don’t know why they didn’t get sick.
In any case, it is not behavioral scientists and community clinicians who have taken on the search for potential immunity. It has immunologists and doctors, and more studies are underway.
We’ve seen immune before
These researchers are convinced that there are people who are not affected by the coronavirus.
Because they’ve seen it before.
Some people are immune to norovirus, which causes infectious diseases. They have a mutation in the gene, and this prevents the virus from penetrating. Some also have genetic protection against tuberculosis and HIV. The discovery of the immune system led to better medicines.
A group of researchers from many countries began searching for participants to study it. It aims to identify genes that promote or prevent infection. They think it may have to do with differences in receptors in humans.
Everyone now knows what the coronavirus looks like, through the bumps that ensure the virus reaches our cells. You should find these spikes a very special protein with us. It’s called ACE2, and it’s found on the surface of cells in the lungs and mucous membranes. But what if the ACE2 proteins in humans were different? The research group will investigate this in couples where one was sick and the other was not.
Not an easy task
Another research group is analyzing genetic data in large biobanks. The project To find out why someone has an additional disease. Now they’ll use the data for the opposite: why someone wasn’t infected at all.
The task is by no means easy, because humans have more than 20 thousand genes, which often work together. And researchers don’t quite know what they’re looking for. The virus is new, and not all facts are on the table about how it works in the body.
Also, no virus-repelling genes operate in a vacuum. They play along with vaccination status, general condition, social habits, occupation, measures of infection, weight, and age.
Another explanation for why some people don’t get infections is that they have a fast and effective immune system in their nose.
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34 injured in a research project
In a completed study, British researchers used people who had not been vaccinated or had the virus. the study It received a lot of attention despite the fact that it only had 34 participants.
Participants were injected with small doses of the coronavirus into their noses. Then they were isolated and tested several times a day. Only half of them contracted the virus.
Of those who did not become ill, most had no trace of the virus, while some had low levels of the virus that were quickly combated by their immune systems. Researchers believe the reason is a quick response from the immune system, but they will continue to work to find an answer.
protected from cold
More researchers Indicates that previous colds can provide protection. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that is now spreading is the seventh in a series of coronaviruses that attack humans. Four of them catch colds, which many have.
It is possible for some people’s immune system to remember past coronavirus attacks and fight off the latest viruses. Why it does not apply to everyone is a mystery.
Immunology researchers struggle to find stable participants for their projects. Because they may have contracted the infection without knowing it. They may contract the virus during the project.
The virus continues to operate in increasingly new and more contagious forms. Uninfected is a free game.
So, I’m not betting on the fact that I’m an interesting genetic mutation, but rather on new vaccine doses and a simple course of the disease. We are uninfected is nothing but a subjective test of adherence to the majority.
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