Sustained immunity to coronavirus is seen over 6 months post infection in recovered patients

These observations should improve quality of discussions about whether vaccine development is important for control of the Covid 19 pandemic.

Abstract

Long-term antibody responses and neutralizing activities following SARS-CoV-2 infections have not yet been elucidated. We quantified immunoglobulin M (IgM) and G (IgG) antibodies recognizing the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike (S) or the nucleocapsid (N) protein, and neutralizing antibodies during a period of six months following COVID-19 disease onset in 349 symptomatic COVID-19 patients, which were among the first world-wide being infected. The positivity rate and magnitude of IgM-S and IgG-N responses increased rapidly. High levels of IgM-S/N and IgG-S/N at 2-3 weeks after disease onset were associated with virus control and IgG-S titers correlated closely with the capacity to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. While specific IgM-S/N became undetectable 12 weeks after disease onset in most patients, IgG-S/N titers showed an intermediate contraction phase, but stabilized at relatively high levels over the six months observation period. At late time points the positivity rates for binding and neutralizing SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies was still over 70%. Taken together, our data indicate sustained humoral immunity in recovered patients who suffer from symptomatic COVID-19, suggesting prolonged immunity.

SARS-CoV-2 infection induces sustained humoral immune responses in convalescent patients following symptomatic COVID-19
Jun Wu, Boyun Liang, Cunrong Chen, Hua Wang, Yaohui Fang, Shu Shen, Xiaoli Yang, Baoju Wang, Liangkai Chen, Qi Chen, Yang Wu, Jia Liu, Xuecheng Yang, Wei Li, Bin Zhu, Wenqing Zhou, Huan Wang, Shumeng Li, Sihong Lu, Di Liu, Huadong Li, Adalbert Krawczyk, Mengji Lu, Dongliang Yang, Fei Deng, Ulf Dittmer, Mirko Trilling, Xin Zheng
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.21.20159178
This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.