fishfoodie wrote: ↑Tue Sep 15, 2020 9:18 pm
Insane_Homer wrote: ↑Tue Sep 15, 2020 8:09 pm
Today I received and performed the antibody test, a voluntary study being conducted by Imperial College London.
It's a pin prick blood test that's done at home and then you send a photo of the result to them along with a rather detailed questionnaire.
As it turns out at first, I did not notice any faint line, but when I uploaded the photo there was a very faint line next to the G-marker suggesting at some point that I might have had it...
Since Jan I've been sick twice, both times with fever and upset stomach but no other COVID symptoms. After the 2nd time I had a test done that came back negative - that was ~15 July. So I don't think either of those was COVID but it seems like at some point I've had it but been otherwise asymptomatic.
This is where I wished I knew some more Biology.
Is this a case of you, potentially, being in middle ground; where
you've had a very small exposure; so your immune system responded & so you show antibodies from that response; but you might not have enough exposure to get any immunity to a larger exposure dose ?
But this is where my knowledge runs out;
would this limited exposure mean that any immunity you get, would be similarly limited; or is one "learned", anti-body enough for your system to respond the same way to any future exposure ??
Or to put it another way is any exposure that produces anti-bodies, enough to give a degree of immunity to future exposures ?*
* with the usual caveats about the lack of knowledge of how long immunity lasts, & virus mutation etc
People talk about immunity as if it’s a binary state when it's nothing of the sort.
You get a virus; your imuune system learns about it and generates antibodies. If the antibodies overwhelm the virus you live, if they don't you due (assuming the virus is deadly).
Assuming you live, your system now knows about the virus and has memory - if it sees the same virus again it "remembers" which antibodies to generate.
The thing is, you don't carry those antibodies around with you for life. Anyone that had the MMR vaccine when young would test negative for any MMR antibodies today, but would be considered immune - because their system would remember the virus and generate the antibodies as needed. Thd trick is teaching the system .
A weak infection will generate a weak memory, and therefore a weak subsequent response. One of the core principles in developing a vaccine is working out whether a large single dose, or a repeater or whatever, generates the best memory
