Nobel Hobos 2 wrote:-SARS- wrote:We'll learn sooner or later, when it starts running out for some of the people who got the virus during the first wave of infections.
I guess they're being tested to check they still have antibodies. It's pretty important to know for future planning.
They are, yes, but we won't learn anything for a while - it was always going to be at least a few months (even the cold-causing coronaviruses give a few months of immunity), and even then, it's not quite so cut and dry - you can remain immune without having any antibodies, if you've got memory immune cells chilling out ready to make new antibodies in response to infection. There's also likely to be a fair bit of variation - in particular, we already know that some children have beaten it off without forming antibodies at all (but frankly, probably had such minor infections that it's more a question of them already being immune than of them not becoming immune), and with SARS-CoV-1, the range of seropositivity duration was from ~2 years up to "18 years and counting".