It's Friday, October. I'm Oscar Ramiras from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. A study out of Britain this week said that people with detectable antibodies for coronavirus fell about over a period of three months over the summer, calling in a question how long immunity lasts. But health experts say this is not a cause to worry. Anybody's tend to wane over time, naturally. A Porva Mondavilli, reporter at The New York Times joins
us for what to know about this anybody's study? Thanks for joining us, Apporva, thanks for having me. What did you talk about this English study that we found out about earlier this week that showed that the number of people that had COVID nineteen antibodies declined over a period of time over the summer that they were studying this, And you know, it calls into questions about long lasting immunity from further infection. It's something that we haven't been
able to really pinpoint yet. You know, how long are you immune from getting COVID nineteen after you were cover from it? But a lot of experts said these worries are overblown. This is actually something that happens all the time. When we recover. Antibodies tend to go away a little bit, and there's other mechanisms in the body that keep our hopes of not being reinfected alive. So apport but tell us a little bit more about what we know about
the study and then what the experts are saying about it. First, I want to say, you know, what you said is absolutely right, that the study is not something to worry about. So let's start from there. These British researchers have been trying to figure out how many people in the population are exposed to the virus, and so they've been sending out periodically these antibody tests, because the presence of antibodies tells you if somebody has been exposed to the virus
and been infected, even if they didn't have symptoms. So they did that a few months ago, and they've done it three times over the course of many months. And what they found is that from the first time they did it to this last one in September, the percent of people who tested positive for antibodies dropped from six percent to four point eight percent, and that works out to something like a drop. So that is what got reported and got everybody worried because it read like a
third of people are losing their antibodies. First of all, this is a population based studies, so it wasn't the same people, so they weren't looking at some set of people three months ago and then going back to those same people and seeing that they no longer had antibodies. This is just a snapshot of people three months ago, a new snapshot now. So that aside, it's also not very surprising that over time people would lose some antibodies.
And that's because when your body first encounters a virus or bacterium, it makes antibodies because you know, the infection is new and it needs all these antibodies to kind of fight the virus. But once that immediate infection is gone, that those huge levels of antibodies that are produced have to go back down, just as a matter of sort of physical space. Even in your blood, you can't possibly carry high levels of antibodies to everything the virus your
body has seen. COVID is not the only thing you're going to fight for the remainder of your life. Basically, that's right, and you've probably seen, you know, dozens and dozens of rhinoviruses and other seasonal cold coronaviruses, common cold viruses, measles, god knows what you've been exposed to. Write, all of those produced auto bodies, and so your blood just can't
have high levels of all of those. So what happens always is that those levels come back down after the initial infection and they kind of go to some sort of steady state. And there are these memory B cells, they're called that B cells are the cells that make the anti bodies, and some small number of them are these memory cells. They basically remember what the virus looks like, and if you ever see that virus again, those memory B cells can produce out of bodies pretty quickly, within
a matter of hours. So there's no need to have auto bodies actually in your blood because those B cells can make them again if you need them, and that's something that the study really didn't show. They didn't look at do these will still have immune memory. And also there are other cells called T immune cells that can also fight the virus. There are TEAM memory cells. Just like there are B memory cells. There are T cells that can actually destroy the virus. There's all kinds of
basically immune mechanisms at play. We just happened to always end up talking about aunti bodies because they're the easiest things to measure, but they're far from the only things that your body has. Yeah, one of the other interesting things about this study is that you mentioned how the government was sending people these tests to administer themselves. They were fingerprick tests, they weren't blood draw tests or anything something that was done in the lab. So the possibility
that it could have missed somebody with lower antibodies. They might have still had some maybe just not at such high levels, was part of it. And then they did also say that there might have been something about you know, like asymptomatic people, maybe they didn't have as high an antibody count as somebody who had the disease more severely. That's right. We know that people make all different levels of antibodies, just like they're all different kinds of people.
Everybody's immune response is just a little bit different. Some people make a ton of anti bodies, and that's usually the case if they've been really severely sick. Makes sense, right, you have really severe symptoms or your body is fighting really hard. So you have a lot of anti bodies, but if you just had really mild symptoms, you may
not have had that many antibodies to begin with. And so you know, when you see that decrease that I was saying earlier is basically normal, you may go below the level that this sort of crude test can pick up. You know, these tests are great for looking at population white prevalence, but in any one person they can actually miss low levels of aunt of bodies. The sensitivity is something like which means in a hundred people who have antibodies,
it would miss sixteen people. So it's not crazy good let's say, right, well, it's good to know that we can kind of dispel some of this and not worry people about thinking there is no elastic immunity at all with the coronavirus. You know, as we're still learning so much about the virus as we go along, and I know we're waiting for vaccines, so there's still a lot yet to know about this virus. So but at least in the meantime, not nothing to worry about as we
go through this. We are still learning a lot about this virus. But I think it's always important to remember that it's a virus. We know about viruses generally, and there's really nothing about this virus that is biologically that different than other viruses. You know, it's more severe, but it doesn't behave basically that all that differently than a lot of other respiratory viruses. So we know kind of
what happens. We don't know how long the immunity lasts, but guessing from other coronaviruses, probably good chances at least a year. So I don't think we should panic quite yet. A porva. Manda Velli, reporter at the New York Times, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm lost for Ramirez and this has been reopening America. Don't forget different today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every money through Friday.
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