Likelihood of severe and 'long' Covid is dictated

Likelihood of severe and 'long' Covid is dictated by the patient's early immune response to infection with the virus, study shows

Article from the UK DailyMail. More reasons for early treatment.
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1. University of Cambridge researchers studied 207 people with Covid-19

2. Those with mild cases or no symptoms had a swift and robust immune response

3. But people with severe cases had a delayed response which led to inflammation

4. Irregularities in immune cells may be behind this discrepancy and abnormalities with these immune cells can last for weeks and may be behind long Covd

How swiftly a person's immune system responds following infection with the coronavirus plays a crucial role in determining disease severity, a study shows.

Cambridge researchers studied 207 people who tested positive for Covid-19 over a three-month period and found those with no symptoms or mild cases mounted a robust immune response soon after getting infected.

But the people with severe cases who required hospitalisation had an impaired immune response, which led to a delayed and weakened attempt to fight the virus.

This undercooked response to the infection is characterised by inflammation of several organs, which occurs immediately after a person catches the coronavirus.

Scientists say abnormalities in immune cells may be behind the slack response to viral infection as well as the body's inflammatory response, and may contribute to severe disease and also 'long Covid'.

Dr Paul Lyons, senior co-author of the study from the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID), said: 'Our evidence suggests that the journey to severe Covid-19 may be established immediately after infection, or at the latest around the time that they begin to show symptoms.

'This finding could have major implications as to how the disease needs to be managed, as it suggests we need to begin treatment to stop the immune system causing damage very early on, and perhaps even pre-emptively in high-risk groups screened and diagnosed before symptoms develop.'

There is no cure for Covid-19 but treatments have improved since it first emerged in China at the end of 2019.

The researchers from the University of Cambridge recruited a range of people who tested positive for the virus to see how the response of the immune system affected a person's prognosis.

These individuals ranged from asymptomatic healthcare workers to patients requiring ventilation.

In the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed but is available as a pre-print on medRxiv, the team analysed blood samples taken regularly over three months.

They compared the samples against those taken from 45 healthy people.

Researchers found evidence of an early, robust adaptive immune response in those infected individuals whose disease was asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic.

An adaptive immune response is when the immune system identifies an infection and then produces T cells, B cells and antibodies specific to the virus to fight back.


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