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Abstract

The majority of infections with SARS-CoV-2 (SCoV2) are asymptomatic or mild without the necessity of hospitalization. It is of outmost importance to reveal if these patients develop an antibody response against SCoV2 and to define which antibodies confer virus neutralization. We hence conducted a comprehensive serological survey of 49 patients with a mild course of disease and quantified neutralizing antibody responses against authentic SCoV2 employing human cells as targets. Four patients (8%), even though symptomatic, did not develop antibodies against SCoV2 and two other sera (4%) were only positive in one of the serological assays employed. For the remainder, antibody response against the S-protein correlated with serum neutralization whereas antibodies against the nucleocapsid were poor predictors of virus neutralization. Only six sera (12%) could be classified as highly neutralizing. Furthermore, sera from several individuals with fairly high antibody levels had only poor neutralizing activity. In addition, our data suggest that antibodies against the seasonal coronavirus 229E contribute to SCoV2 neutralization. Altogether, we show that there is a wide breadth of antibody responses against SCoV2 in patients that differentially correlate with virus neutralization. This highlights the difficulty to define reliable surrogate markers for immunity against SCoV2.

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Mexico is falling far behind in testing. Many major cities and suburban areas have drive through testing based on a list of possible symptoms. Mexico is approaching 53,000 deaths due to COVID in a population just below 130 million.

BC Snob wrote:

Tracking Changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: Evidence that D614G Increases Infectivity of the COVID-19 Virus

dturm wrote:

The best way to achieve herd immunity is through a vaccination program, hopefully that can be achieved through the first half of 2021.

silversand wrote:

....I've always wondered not "if", but "when" the sars-cov-2 proof-reading system makes an copying error, and a regular genome examination "catches" it as a dissimilarity (shortly after a country wide or Global deployment of a/some Phase 3 success), how quickly a safe version 2.0 vaccine could be modified from version 1.0 as version 1.0 is scrapped/recalled ? Its known that sars-cov-2 doesn't mutate particularly quickly....but eventually it ("it" being the spike protein) will.

silversand wrote:



Holas Chris:


Now, Mexico. Why is Mexico's death rate so astronomically high, and only surpassed by just 4 countries in Latina America and the Caribbean, as of July 15th (site: Statista portal)? Whatever the answer to that question turns out to be, if Mexico's mortality rate is to be believed, Mexico is in very deep, deep trouble if, as the article you link to, suggests that Mexico is throwing every caution to the wind, and allowing its entire population to be infected towards some sort of "herd immunity" program.

IF Mexico is pursuing a herd immunity program, it may take a year or two before the majority of the population gets the infection (and this would be tempered by any vaccine that may eventually become available to Mexico, and deployed, in maybe a year or two realistically). This would not bode well for RVing and tourism in Mexico over the coming several years, and would not bode well for expats presently living / long-terming in Mexico.

Cheers for now, careful out there...

BC Snob wrote:

The receptor binding domain of the spike protein recognizes and binds to the receptor on the human ACE2 protein which is on surfaces of cells; this is a key mechanism for how this virus infects humans. If the vaccines target this specific region of the virus and the virus changes in this region the vaccine will likely become ineffective AND the virus may no longer be able to bind to the human ACE2 receptor (become non-infectious).