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Most people who have recovered from COVID-19, even with mild illness, retain a broad and durable immunity to the disease, including some degree of protection against its variants, according to an Emory University study published in the journal, Cell Reports Medicine. The longitudinal study, the most comprehensive of its kind to date, involved 254 COVID-19 patients, between the ages of 18 to 82 years, who provided blood samples at various points for a period of over eight months beginning in April 2020. About 71 percent of the patients had mild disease, 24 percent experienced moderate illness, and five percent had...

For those who recover from COVID-19, new research shows immunity to the virus can last for at least 8 months, and may last much longer.Understanding how our immune system responds to the virus is an important step in vaccine development.Currently two vaccines, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are authorized for use in the United States.Several other promising vaccines are also in development, but until they become widely available we must practice physical distancing and mask-wearing to keep transmission down.All data and statistics are based on publicly available data at the time of publication. Some information may be out of date. Visit...

Nearly a year into this virus, it has become clear that, after up to a third of the people in this country already contracted it, according to some estimates, there is nothing we can do to stop it through non-pharmaceutical interventions. Yet, while the government and media continue to push the vaccine (and masks, of course) with religious fervor, they act as if natural infection itself confers little or no immunity. In reality, as with any virus, it likely confers more immunity than a vaccine. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by U.K. scientists tracked...

Starting in the fall of 2016 and continuing into 2018, researchers at Columbia University in Manhattan began collecting nasal swabs from 191 children, teachers, and emergency workers, asking them to record when they sneezed or had sore throats. The point was to create a map of common respiratory viruses and their symptoms, and how long people who recovered stayed immune to each one. The research included four coronaviruses, HKU1, NL63, OC42, and C229E, which circulate widely every year but don’t get much attention because they only cause common colds. But now that a new coronavirus in the same broad family,...

Troubling headlines have been cropping up across Asia: Some patients in China, Japan and South Korea who were diagnosed with COVID-19 and seemingly recovered have been readmitted to the hospital after testing positive for the virus again. Because SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was only discovered a few months ago, scientists are still trying to answer many big questions related to the virus and the disease it causes. Among them is whether patients can be reinfected by the virus after they seem to recover from the symptoms. With other coronavirus strains, experts say the antibodies that patients produce...