How Long Does COVID-19 Immunity Last?

The term Immunity refers to the body’s ability to prevent the invasion of pathogens, i.e. foreign disease-causing substances; such as bacteria and viruses. An immune response is the body’s defense system to fight against antigens and protect the body. Active immunity as a process of exposing the body to an antigen to produce an adaptive immune response, while passive immunity “borrows” antibodies from another person. Covid-19 the current pandemic is a virus too. The person who gets affected, the recovery takes around 15 days and once recovered body develops active immunity against the disease which helps fight against the virus in the future.

The immune response to coronavirus:

The immunity works like cellular memory. Post-COVID infection when the body is done fighting against it. It remembers how to deal with it the next time. But the real question is for how long the immunity remains, how long it takes for the body to forget the procedure, and the steps how it dealt with the virus previously. Well, it all depends on our antibodies, how quickly they plunge away. As soon as those antibodies are gone the body’s immunity against the virus ends. But then again, we can never know too much and we cannot be too sure about our immune system as yet.

How long will COVID-19 immunity last?

Research from China suggests antibodies to the virus that causes COVID-19 start to drop within three weeks of the infection. It had been hoped that people who’d had COVID-19 might develop long-term immunity to further infections in the future. The research suggests that many people who recover from COVID-19 may still develop long-term immunity, but a few could remain vulnerable to future infection.

It sure is a strange thing that always tends to surprise the scientists, especially in the case of COVID-19. It is seen that in many of the COVID patient’s body relies more on the T cells than on the antibodies. Whereas in certain patients the decline in antibodies was troublesome.

Showing that immunity is created differently among different COVID patients. Hence detailed longitudinal studies are still the need of the hour to properly understand the science behind this and to formally state a theory. In some cases, low levels of antibodies were still enough to fight against the virus and create immunity for the future. Hence for now it can be said that previously infected people can utilize their immunological memory in case they are exposed to the virus again somehow. It has become a global need to understand COVID 19 and efforts are being done efficiently till date by the greatest health organizations and research centers of the world.

Developing a vaccine:

Honestly, we don’t know yet. We are still not sure what kind of COVID-19 immunity we will get from a vaccination, whether total protection or just protection from the worst symptoms. Fortune says, we’re likely to get true protection, but we don’t know for sure, and also it’s not something that we can just assess from antibody levels. It won’t be possible until we directly measure the vaccine’s efficacy that will help us to know the relationship between antibody levels and immunity, and what sort of immune response a vaccine needs to draw out to provide true protection. If it turns out pre-exposure to COVID-19 and doesn’t guarantee permanent or strong immunity, everyone would be recommended for vaccination as a result. Moreover, clinical trials for examining the safety and efficacy of the vaccine would be needed to include people from this previously infected population.

Lest hope that vaccines will give much stronger and longer-lasting immune responses to the virus than getting and recovering from COVID-19 itself in the future. Indeed, in early July, the first vaccine candidates from Pfizer and Moderna showed very strong immune responses. However, these studies can’t be accurate because only reported out to 14 and 57 days after vaccinations were completed. As a result, they don’t tell us whether there is a long-lived response that we would need for a vaccine to be truly protective in our life.