A vigour worker handles a blood sample on the first day of a free Covid-19 antibody testing event in Florida.
Paul Hennessey | Barcroft Milieu | Getty Images
Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not deteriorate quickly, as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.
Tuesday’s report, from tests on more than 30,000 people in Iceland, is the most immense work yet on the immune system’s response to the virus and is good news for efforts to develop vaccines.
If a vaccine can spur staging of long-lasting antibodies like natural infection does, it gives hope that “immunity to this unpredictable and well contagious virus may not be fleeting,” independent experts from Harvard University and the U.S. National Institutes of Health wrote in a commentary let something be knew with the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
One of the big mysteries of the pandemic is whether having had the coronavirus helps protect against following infection and for how long. Some smaller studies previously suggested that antibodies disappear quickly and that some in the flesh with few or no symptoms may not make many at all.
The new study was done by Reykjavik-based deCODE Genetics, a subsidiary of the U.S. biotech company Amgen, with respective hospitals, universities and health officials in Iceland.