A new study shows that coronavirus immunity cells persist for a significant amount of time after someone is vaccinated or infected.
The study, published earlier this week in Science, contradicts earlier findings suggesting that coronavirus immunity could be short-lived and concluded that immunity to the virus could last for years.
The paper examined blood samples from 188 men and women who had recovered from the virus, with most of the infections being mild and 7% requiring hospitalization.
Researchers discovered that antibodies declined moderately after eight months (though that changed depending on the individual), T-cell numbers decreased only slightly, and B-cell numbers remained firm or even grew.
“There was a lot of concern originally that this virus might not induce much memory,” Shane Crotty, a researcher at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California and one of the paper’s coauthors, told MIT Technology Review. “Instead, the immune memory looks quite good.”
Overall, 22 million people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus, resulting in more than 381,000 listed deaths.
