Coronavirus antibody prevalence falling in England, REACT study shows | Hacker News Reader

Coronavirus antibody prevalence falling in England, REACT study shows

imperial.ac.uk

31 pointsdfgdghdf36 comments

Note that this does not mean that immunity is also fading. Antibodies don't exist all the time in the bloodstream: immunological memory (in the case of antibodies, in the form of memory B cells) is what can prompt a quick response in case of reinfection.

In fact, there isn't enough data to even know how long immunity is. And let's not get started with T cell immunity, which seems to play a role with this virus and is not touched by such a study.

I am absolutely baffled at how the media is covering this study, it's basically "front page" or I've seen it as the number 1 news item.

Yet this doesn't mean anything as they didn't study T-cell response, and many other things.

It is absolutely ridiculous fearmongering, and clickbait, by a top university + the press.

As far as I know there has been 1 reinfection case in the entire US, and that was questionable as the guy tested positive the second time a few days after testing negative, so its possible it was a false positive. 1 case, in the ENTIRE US. It is ridiculous to suggest there isn't some sort of immunity. The virus has been around for 9 months now.

I listened to the lead of the study on the radio this morning - he certainly didn't suggest that there was "no immunity" and was careful about linking the fall in anti-bodies to immunity.

I think it is clear that there is some connection though; not straightforward, but there is a link. On the other hand (as the scientist on the radio mentioned) apparently vaccines often work differently and it may be that they offer longer immunity.

The bigger question is how effective the acquired immunity is, and the only way to test it would be to infect a bunch of people who test positive for antibodies or reactive T cells. Pretty dangerous.

Then you'd catalogue symptoms shown by those people held in quarantine, with different innoculum doses given including placebo.

Somewhat similar to a phase 3 trial of a vaccine too, you can do it at the same time.

>the only way to test it would be to infect a bunch of people

That's not actually true. You can get a database of people who've had it and follow up on them to see how they get on in terms of reinfection etc.

I'm kind of curious in my own case - I had it in Apr, had a positive antibody test in Jul - if I'm getting further exposure and antibody top ups. Probably I am as a public transport user in London but there's a limited access to test labs and the like.

That's insufficient as you cannot know if people got reinfected but had low symptoms. Further, you cannot know if these same people are infectious during some brief window. (Carriers.)

The (British) press only ever reports bad news, or speculative good news. Science reporting is a joke at best. Example, the MMR vaccine "causes autism" (it doesn't), was front page news for months. When Andrew Wakefield was conclusively discredited, that barely made the front page in most newspapers, and the damage was done.

Bad news sells unfortunately.

Scientist: "My findings are meaningless if taken out of context." Media: Scientist claims "Findings are meaningless."

See also: the Daily Mail's list of things that give or cure cancer. https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/

Put to song amusingly by comedian Russell Howard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3chJN9DCGg

Bad news travels ultra fast in this environment. And good news develops slowly.

I've been following 'coronavirus good news' on twitter, it helps https://twitter.com/Coronavirusgoo1

This looks like great content, unfortunately with a terrible account name.

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”

― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

I highly recommend the r/COVID19 subreddit. It is more strictly moderated than r/coronavirus, and is focused on scientific publications and academic commentary over news articles. You also have a decent amount of users visiting there who have a lot of expertise in various related fields.

The mood over there has been cautiously upbeat for a while now, at least in comparison to the tone often set by the mainstream media.

> I am absolutely baffled at how the media is covering this study, it's basically "front page" or I've seen it as the number 1 news item.

Rather on par with the coverage so far as far as I can tell. The media has been going on about "cases" (i.e. positive) tests and comparing absolute numbers between countries which do not have the same absolute numbers of people.

Yep and using daily numbers instead of rolling averages. Awful.

Welcome to science reporting in general. Covid reporting hasn't been any worse (maybe even slightly better due to time available to become slightly familiar).

Wait until a new paper mentioning Quantum Teleportation is published to see how bad things can really get.

https://loricism.fandom.com/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_Effect

On that topic, I found out that using specimen date instead of reporting date (for those health agencies that do that) gives you a far better picture of the trend, since reports can lag a lot due to testing bottlenecks.

> As far as I know there has been 1 reinfection case in the entire US

Wait, really? A recent article in the Dutch news [1] mentioned the first death by reinfection, and also mentioned that there were at the time 23 other reinfections were known worldwide. Seems odd that there'd be just a single American in there, given the number of infections in the US.

[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2352120-nederlandse-vrouw-overlijdt-n...

More Antivax fuel. Awesome...

Just like "new study shows people are shedding coronavirus for months" when they are just saying people test positive for RT-PCR tests, without trying to cultivate the virus from those tested as "positive for months".

Get your facts straight. They sequenced the strains: 2 different strains.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I guess it's kind of interesting as a headline though they should point out that it doesn't mean immunity is falling. One thing that give me hope is the Singapore study that SARS 1 victims still had T cell immunity 17 years later.

there is ~10 cases of confirmed reinfection in the world, and one death among them. Over what? Hundreds of millions of cases? So the only thing you can deduce is: some people might get reinfected by covid, the reinfection seems to be worse (at least in confirmed reinfection cases, but this is skewed because the only time we get reinfection cases is when people are put in a hospital, so...)

Also antibody-based immunity should not fade that quick (less than a month for the elderly that died) so those are fringe cases and nothing else, and trying to make some sort of rule for reinfection less than a year before the patient 0 was even infected for the first time is a bad idea.

Immunological memory has a few aspects, one of which is like you say the memory B cells, which take over from antibodies after a while. If I'm not mistaken however, there are also long-lived plasma cells which keep producing very low levels of antibodies for decades. In fact, with a single drop of blood, they can figure out every infection you've ever had [0]

Still, it's perfectly normal for antibodies to wane after an infection. I'm unsure in general what to make of this study, maybe the number just drops under the limited sensitivity of their test. This study [1] finds that antibodies are stably produced for months after the infection

0: https://www.hhmi.org/news/your-viral-infection-history-singl...

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7554472/

Is there any better summary of reinfection cases than this one from Dutch website BNO https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-t...?

24 cases worldwide. Seems like human immune systems are very effective against this disease.

And the only person who died was a 89 year old woman on chemotherapy:

> Here, we report a case of a reinfection, in an 89-year old Dutch woman, suffering from Waldenström’s acroglobulinemia, treated with B-cell-depleting therapy

Of course people without a functioning immune system can get reinfected. But those aren't the kind of reinfections that are relevant when we have to consider policy/mitigation. And with close to a billion people having been infected and there being only a handful of cases of reinfection it's pretty obvious that covid immunity is strong and long-lasting.

Scared people don't care about probabilities. We have known for months that the IFR is <0.01% for people under 40 and even lower for children, youth, and young adults. Yet they still blabber that everyone is in grave danger.

>We have known for months that the IFR is <0.01%

I don't think that's quite correct (in the US anyway), but if you have evidence otherwise feel free to share it.

* 2,046 people age 35 and under have died of Covid-19 in the US as of Oct 10. [1]

* People under 35 constitute 49.5% of the population in the US. [2]

* An estimated 9.3% of the population has antibodies as of September [3]

330,00,000 x .49.5 x .093 = 15.2 million people in the < 35 year old age group infected as of September. Maybe 16.7 million now with the increase in cases since then, so:

.012% IFR for people < 35 years old (obviously it would be higher - probably about double I would guess - if you did people 40 and under)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/demographic-statistics

[3] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/09/less-10-...

That was a typo, sorry. I meant to write <0.02%, which is still nothing to worry about.

>.012% IFR for people < 35 years old

Thanks for running those numbers.

I wonder if you and I would disagree on the significance of the .012% IFR that you calculated?

I started a reply with some feedback, mentioning one of the t-cell studies showing that several times as many people may have immunity than you are showing [0], and also that somewhere between 80-95% of the dead in the < 35 age group had comorbidities [1], which improves the odds a lot if you don't have comorbidities.

But even using your < 35 numbers, .012% is about 1 in 8000 odds of dying after infection, and I don't see that as statistically significant (EDIT: corrected wording).

I guess the reason I say this is that I would not want 6-18 months of my social and/or economic life to be upended by something that only has a 1 in 8,000 chance of happening.

I'm running on worse odd than that, being over 35. I take some precautions, and want to be considerate to those more worried about their odds, but I'd much rather not give up a large percentage of the precious time I have left in this world hiding from something that has less than a one in a thousand chance happening to me.

Rather than quibble over numbers I'm curious if you interpret the same numbers differently? Do you think 1 in 8000 is statistically significant?

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2598-9

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

Imperial has pretty close links with the popular press. Their studies are far more likely to make front page BBC news than say similar studies from Cambridge.

The BBC also frequently invites Imperial staff on as on-air experts for almost any other issue.

Doesn't hurt that they're in the middle of Kensington does it...

I took part in this test. In April/May I had a slight cough, tight chest and got breathless when walking. I had a very faint line indicating short term antibodies, then the second test I had no signs.

Now if I had covid is another question. Everyone has been pretty damning of the testing system. Phone up doctors or an NHS help line, it's pretty much 'You may have mild symptoms' well how about we just do some testing yeah?

I have no faith in the government stats for covid, if they're not even sending people to get tests then how on earth do they know what's really going on?

The Dutch are pretty much doing mass testing by analysing virus particles in sewage waste water.

This gives you city level resolution of the virus spread and prevalence but I assume it relies on the assumption that the majority of infected people will also have detectable GI virus concentrations.

The ONS in the UK has been doing some very good work tracking prevalence in the community (and because they understand the statistical processes they're using properly, they update the estimates of past prevalence too). Unfortunately the ONS data is not reported as often in the press because it's updated only weekly, whereas test and trace-based absolute numbers are reported daily even though they're close to useless for population-level or region-level analysis.

Unfortunately there's no similarly reliable source aimed at understanding prevalence and spread in institutional settings I'm aware of. This is a particular concern given that institutional settings encompasses hospitals and care homes, where a large portion of the most vulnerable are.

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