COVID-19: Antibodies may last for days in some, decades in others - Study

A medical worker fills a syringe from a vial of the AstraZeneca vaccine at a vaccination hub outside Rome’s Termini railway station. Pic/AFP

Antibodies against the novel Coronavirus wane at different rates, lasting for mere days in some individuals, while persisting in others for decades, according to a new study which says COVID-19 severity could be a deciding factor in having longer-lasting protection against reinfection.

The research, published in The Lancet Microbe journal, noted that recovered patients with low levels of neutralising antibodies may still be protected from reinfection if they have robust immunity in the form of the body's T cells.

In the study, scientists, including those from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, followed 164 COVID-19 patients for six to nine months, analysing their blood for neutralising antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, their T cells and immune system signalling molecules.

They then used this information to train a machine learning algorithm to predict the trajectories of people's neutralising antibodies over time. Based on the analysis, the researchers categorised people into five groups depending on how long their antibodies lasted.

"The key message from this study is that the longevity of functional neutralising antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 can vary greatly and it is important to monitor this at an individual level," said Professor Wang Linfa, from Duke-NUS' Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) Programme, a corresponding author of the study.

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3,93,531
No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours

12,43,39,436
Total no. of cases worldwide

27,36,668
Total no. of deaths worldwide

Source: WHO/Johns Hopkins

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