CARL AZUZ: Our first topic this Thursday on CNN 10, antibodies, what they are, how they work and what they have to do with coronavirus. I`m Carl Azuz. Thank you for watching.
The American Red Cross is a humanitarian group that helps people in times of emergency or disaster.
It recently told CNN that in the first week of March, 20 percent of the blood donations it received from people who had not gotten the coronavirus vaccine showed they still had antibodies to the disease. What does that mean?
The short answer is that they`ve probably been infected COVID at some point whether they had symptoms or not.
The percentage of Red Cross blood donations that had antibodies present has steadily increased since last summer as more people have gotten and recovered from coronavirus.
An advisor to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says blood donors are not a random sample of the population.
So this 20 percent figure isn`t a strict, scientific study. But it does reflect the disease`s spread in America. For its part, the CDC estimates by the end of 2020, more than a quarter of the U.S. population had been infected.
It`s hard to know exactly because at least 40 percent of people with COVID may have no symptoms and may not get tested. Those who have been exposed can develop natural antibodies to protect them against the disease. What`s not known is how long these antibodies work and if they can keep people from getting different variants or strains of COVID. This is similar to what doctors say about vaccines. That people who get them are protected against coronavirus but how long and whether this protects them from new strains.
That`s still unknown. In all cases though, our antibodies may play a role.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One of the ways our immune system protects us from viruses is through antibodies. Antibodies are proteins in our blood that attach themselves to parts of viruses. That limit`s the infection and also alerts white blood cells to come in, attack and eliminate the virus.
So in many cases, if the body encounters the same virus again, the immune system has left over antibodies that are taught and remember the previous infection. These cells can either fight off the deadly virus directly or they can produce more antibodies to help prevent the infection. Researchers aren`t entirely sure why this process works so well for some viruses but not others. Our immune systems seem to remember some viruses better than others.
A person is generally protected for life after one encounter with viruses like chicken pox or polio. However, there are some viruses that our immune systems seem to easily forget. Scientists have reported that immunity could be short lived after encounters with some common seasonal coronaviruses which can cause the common cold.
That could help explain why we can repeatedly get sick with something as simple as a cold even if we think we`ve been exposed to cold viruses before. We could be getting exposed to new strains as well. Some viruses like the flu can mutate often which means our old antibodies no longer work against these strains.
While most experts do believe that we`re probably going to have some protection after being infected with the coronavirus, we`re still not sure just how long that protection will be or how strong.
