SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls

criminal. History will reveal this seemingly unavoidable folly in hindsight as a great mistake. The majority of serious illnesses and deaths are the elderly and them and others with comorbidities. There is the outlier young person who has no comorbidities, and is perfectly healthy, but it is a very, very small number. It seems a young male 24 years and younger should have the right to self-assess with their doctor on the risks of myocarditis vs. the 3.8e-5 benefits of getting vaccinated, and certainly not being mandated to be vaccinated. There is also a large number of people like myself who have had COVID, but unlike me they did not feel it enough to go get tested or treated. That will only serve to show how much more the risks are for vaccinated myocarditis. My antibodies are still sitting high a year after my infection and recovery at 116 (IgG), when > 15 is considered an indicative amount to give a positive on the test. I have not had a reinfection (that I have felt or know of), and yet I am forced to test weekly and wear a mask to keep my job. At least 10 people in a company of 150 at this location have had a noticeable infection (I refuse to call it a "break through" infection any longer, it no longer make sense). These 10 all had at least 2 shots, mainly Pfizer, and 4 had boosters! I know SARS-COV-1 from 2003 is in the family, but a different animal, however, they are still testing SARS-COV-1 recovered people from 18 years ago who still have immunity in their T-cells![1] Will we ever learn (or Fauci from his 80s AIDS/AZT fiasco [1.1] (I was in my twenties in BKLYN)to now with the COVID crisis), or is natural immunity thrown overboard for the sake of not discouraging vaccinations, which is cruel from my perspective, and now we know this will not stop the spread anyway, so I wage my natural immunity against anyone's 2 vaccines, and I spot you two more boosters ;) Yes, I know the company line is at least one vaccine and natural immunity gives you super immunity. I don't believe it outweighs the risks for me. One of the people of the 10 mentioned above had a horrible bout of COVID after 2 shots and a booster, and he's 20 years younger than me. I don't drink or smoke. I used to exercise daily (BMI 25), but I have since put on a few pounds (BMI 29) switching from manual work at 40% if the time to office work 60% of the time, to almost 95% office work now and COVID comfort food. A lot of the people under 55 that have had serious illness or died had comorbidities such as obesity and/or diabetes and others. Look for yourself on the CDC website. Download and filter by age and comorbidities or not. You will see that this is being buried. Fat shaming etc. I also read an interesting statistical study that said of the vulnerable that died, if COVID had not accelerated it, the flu or pneumonia would have, and they statistically were likely to die within 2 years of their age given their age and pre-existing comorbidities. Temper the 800,000 US deaths with that number and see how bad you think it is after doing some research. Let that sink in. Look at the UK's NHS site for number of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test for COVID-19 [2]. It's sad but their site and they way they present data is so much better than the CDC's site. We focus so much on number of cases here, and it's hard to put together nice comparisons on the CDC site without downloading the CSV data files and doing it yourself. We live with SARS-COV-1 and MERS, so let's get back to normal. America needs to address its obesity, diabetes, and other health issues if you really want to save more lives or have something to panic about. I am an American BTW. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z [1.1] https://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/49111 [2] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nati...

vaccinate people). We are trying to better mimic the response the human body gives naturally. Natural response also lasts a long time (in effectiveness), too: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z "Next, we showed that patients (n = 23) who recovered from SARS (the disease associated with SARS-CoV infection) possess long-lasting memory T cells that are reactive to the N protein of SARS-CoV 17 years after the outbreak of SARS in 2003". 17 years. (Additionally, to the earlier point, lots of people infected with earlier SARS-COV variants appear to have an effective immune response to SARS-COV-2, because the natural generated response targeted preserved-between-viruses regions) Now, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't get vaccinated if you were infected - in fact, the strongest immunity that is seen from people who were infected and then vaccinated. This appears to generate a very strong, very effective response. But this "hunting with a shotgun instead of a sniper rifle" stuff is just stupid. So is citing 2 studies that say different things and saying "therefore i've proven natural immunity is unreliable" Any real discussion about vaccination vs natural immunity would have to go into CD4/CD8 response, what regions are targeted/preserved in mutations, etc. IMHO These kinds of articles do a lot more harm than good, because the misinfo in them is easy to discover, and that convinces people even further of conspiracies. They take an area where science is actually trying to figure out the answers (we aren't all that good at understanding the immune response), and pretends we know. That isn't going to help get people vaccinated.

tests will fail to detect a prior infection after just a few months. T-Detect now says that its test can pick up infections that occurred 10 months ago. 10 months is probably not the limit of detection; it's just based on the amount of time T-Detect has been available to the public. Researchers have found memory T cells that respond to the original SARS-CoV virus 17 years post-infection: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z

It's like the opposite of the pareto principle. Before I get into the health stuff, since we do have the 1A here, I will always argue the 1A over the health stuff, because arguing the merits of the policy on public health grounds means implicitly ceding the first amendment argument. Anyway, let's begin: The reason I would still be against it if I were in, say, Europe, is because from a public health standpoint, I believe these measures worsen mortality over the long-term (and indeed the medium-term, and possibly even the short-term). In short, this is because universal lockdown increases the proportion of at-risk people that must get sick before we hit herd immunity. Additionally, lockdown is going to reduce a population's sunlight exposure (Vitamin D is INCREDIBLY important for respiratory pathology, but nitric oxide is important too), it's going to reduce the amount people exercise/sleep, it's going to increase fear/anxiety, and it's going to decrease social interaction. Each of those individually are bad for the immune system, but taken together it's disastrous. Severe COVID-19 seems to be an immunoregulatory disorder. You don't so much die from the virus as you do your immune response to the virus. A virus like SARS-2, which is adapted to spread well (for example, it suppresses interferon in the early stages of infection which creates a ~2 day window of pre-symptomatic spread where viral load is high enough to transmit and yet there are no visible symptoms), but it is a very poor killer (even the CDC estimates a .65% IFR, and the CDC has a vested interest in using the worst numbers possible). Furthermore the population targetted by SARS-2 is almost exclusively the very old or the very sick, which means the average years of life lost (YLL) per death is much lower than for Influenza, which actually does kill children in real amounts. So in conclusion: - the measures to slow spread don't seem to work to slow spread (this applies to universal masking btw) - but insofar as those measures do slow spread, that's a bad thing, because it increases the number of high-risk individuals that will get sick over the long-run, and - of those who do get sick, if they've spent the last 3 months locked down they are more likely to die BTW, since pre-existing exposure to non-SARS human coronaviruses produces T-cell cross-reactivity [1], we could have produced a pseudo-vaccine already by just dosing people with live non-SARS human coronaviruses. [1] ["SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls"](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z) - Published: 15 July 2020 - Here, we first studied T cell responses to structural (nucleocapsid protein, NP) and non-structural (NSP-7 and NSP13 of ORF1) regions of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 convalescents (n=36). In all of them we demonstrated the presence of CD4 and CD8 T cells recognizing multiple regions of the NP protein. We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 NP. - Surprisingly, we also frequently detected SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells in individuals with no history of SARS, COVID-19 or contact with SARS/COVID-19 patients (n=37)

herd immunity could exist with less than 1 - 1/R0 of the population infected? But even ignoring any pre-existing immunity, that calculation assumes a homogeneous and well-mixed population. That's clearly not the case, since some people (a nurse in a crowded ER, a police officer, a store clerk, a nightlife enthusiast, etc.) have far more contacts than others (a remote worker who gets stuff delivered). People with more contacts will get infected first, with disproportionate harm, and then become immune first, with disproportionate benefit. Many papers have modeled[2] this; though no one's found a great way to measure that heterogeneity yet, so for now, it's hard to say much beyond that the effect exists, and is potentially big. And finally, herd immunity isn't a binary threshold, especially in a heterogeneous population. As others have noted, even places without enough immunity for R < 1 will still have slower spread than in a naive population, or may get to R < 1 from the immunity plus slightly more cautious behavior. Conversely, places that do have R < 1 overall may still have pockets of spread in sub-populations with unusually high R0. In any case, it's no conspiracy theory to believe that NYC developed significant amounts of immunity along the way to its ~24k (about 0.3% of the population!) deaths. 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z 2. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.20021725v...

needs to be controlled and not passively waited out." And yet. > "It’s still unknown whether they have short term immunity for about a year like with other coronaviruses, or any immunity at all." Obviously people develop an immunity, their immune systems are responsible for clearing the virus out. If the immune system wasn't able to clear the virus out, they'd be dead. It's also fair to say that the more serious coronaviridae like SARS convey antibody-based immunity for >3 years [1] and T-cell immunity for 17 years and counting [2] so it's not exactly a shot in the dark. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z

induced by previous pathogens can shape the susceptibility to, and clinical severity of, subsequent infections. <snip> We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak." - from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z

structural (nucleocapsid protein, NP) and non-structural (NSP-7 and NSP13 of ORF1) regions of SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 convalescents (n=36). In all of them we demonstrated the presence of CD4 and CD8 T cells recognizing multiple regions of the NP protein. We then showed that SARS-recovered patients (n=23) still possess long-lasting memory T cells reactive to SARS-NP 17 years after the 2003 outbreak, which displayed robust cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 NP. * Surprisingly, we also frequently detected SARS-CoV-2 specific T cells in individuals with no history of SARS, COVID-19 or contact with SARS/COVID-19 patients (n=37) > It's not callousness unless you're explicitly denying that reality and justifying excess death and illness on a dynamic which may not even be in play. Again, the excess death is the deaths caused by lockdown, not the deaths caused by a highly infectious respiratory virus. All highly infectious respiratory viruses are dealt with the same way: acquiring population immunity. Vaccines are just a way to achieve that more cheaply, but because we do not currently have a vaccine it does not make sense to try to "stop, drop and roll" until we have one. Especially because, speaking for the US, we are on track to hit population immunity before we ever get one.

SARS-2, have long-lasting immunity. Their t-cells not only react to SARS-1 after 17 years, they also have immunity to SARS-2, which is a testament to how similar they are structurally speaking. Additionally exposure to those common cold human coronaviruses you mentioned almost certainly confers immunity to SARS-2 based off that same paper. We're still hashing out the details, of course. Immunology is incredibly complex and there is still plenty to learn about as far as the exact specifics of what unfolds here, yes. But we should assume reinfection isn't possible, because: - It doesn't happen in SARS-1 which is by far the best model we have - If it did happen, given the MILLIONS of cases of COVID-19 worldwide, we would have seen THOUSANDS of rigorously documented examples of the phenomenom happening - Those arguing for reinfection tend to not make any mention of immunological memory - Those arguing for reinfection do so to in an attempt to scare us into staying locked down until "the vaccine", which I am opposed to because I am opposed to any public health policy that banks on a future technological innovation that does not yet exist, particularly when I fear that the environment of irrational fear and anxiety and outright hysteria is going to be used to mandate vaccines, which is highly unethical under my moral framework -- As far as me sounding over-certain, frankly it's cognitive draining to be arguing against a horde of people whose priors have been completely screwed up by programming from a media that takes delight in knowingly lying to citizens, and even our trusted public health officials like Fauci don't have the courage or perhaps the desire to break out of the collective mass delusion we are all trapped in. So yes, if I had infinite time and energy I agree, I could do a way better job of capturing uncertainty. I've written an 8000+ word writeup on COVID that does a much better job capturing the uncertainty, but it's very difficult to do without...writing 8000 words. Also this doesn't justify it but I do feel the need to point out that those arguing for the "doom" scenario are even more egregiously overstating certainty, and tend to not be called out on their ridiculous statements. So that's why I tend to come into these threads guns blazing, with the predictable result of getting hammered by downvotes. C'est la vie.