This is a really big question because we still don’t know everything about the virus.
We still know relatively little about the virus as a whole.
Questions like these are going to ultimately decide when we can go about our normal lives again. We don’t know how long antibodies against this coronavirus will stick around for, and George Rutherford, the head of infectious disease and global epidemiology at the University of California San Francisco said: “That’s something that’s going to take a while to figure out.”
Other similar Coronavirus have been found to only be recognised by the body for around 2 years after infection, and then, after that you are seemingly susceptible to the virus once again.
Understanding the bodies immunity against the 2019 Coronavirus allows us to determine whether herd immunity is an option, where the immune people in society essentially shield the vulnerable, and when exactly we should relax social distancing measures.
The hope for many scientists, and probably you reading this, is that this Coronavirus triggers a lifetime immunity as seen in other viruses like chickenpox.
“This is the hope for Covid-19,” Rutherford said.
“There is no proof at this point that the development of an antibody response will be protective,” said David Walt, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There is no evidence yet that people can’t be reinfected with the virus.”
“The most similar virus to this shows there is not a protracted immune response,” Walt said.
But despite this, Rutherford has said that there is some evidence that people can become immune to the virus, but depending on how long the immunity lasts, many people may have to get seasonal jabs just like the flu.
“If we can get enough people immune in the population, this could die out,” Rutherford said. “It just goes back into bats or wherever it came from.”
