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There’s an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that says we’re closer to herd immunity than we know. It states that if you look at the T cells – the cells that remember infections from the past – we’ll see that quite a few people have developed immunity to COVID-19 without ever having any symptoms.
Dr. Gordon Cohen, MD of Mercer Island, joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.
“One of the things that has been largely ignored in all these serious COVID warnings is the fact that COVID cases have fallen 77% in the past six weeks. So this opinion piece by Dr. Marty Makary – a noted surgeon and public health expert – he says that “if a drug reduces the number of cases by 77%, we call it a miracle pill.” So he asks the question: why is the number of cases decreasing? And it has to do with the different types of immunity our body has, antibodies versus T cells, ”said Dr. Cohen.
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According to that theory, the numbers behind the mortality rate and the infection rate seem to indicate greater herd immunity than initially thought.
“When we run antibody tests, these antigen-specific T cells or memory T cells are not captured once they have been activated by the virus. And it is very interesting that he points out that people who survived the 1918 Spanish flu in 2008 – 90 years later – were found with memory T cells that were still able to produce neutralizing antibodies, ”he said.
So what he says is that about one in 600 Americans has died from COVID-19, which translates to a population death rate of about 0.15%. So that’s the theoretical death rate of COVID-19. But the current death rate for COVID-19 infections is 0.23%. So these numbers actually suggest that about two-thirds of the U.S. population has already had the infection (possibly without knowing it). “
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In other words, the tests that have been done are testing the antibodies that are currently fighting the infection. Once those antibodies are gone, the T cells are left to remember that infection, which are the ones that will actually protect you from the future infection. But the tests do not reveal their existence.
“This is how our body naturally develops immunity. But when we test people to see if they have a response to the vaccination, we test for antibodies, we do not test for T cell activity. So what he has noticed is through the use of a variety of mathematical models, it is possible that by April, based on his mathematical data and what we do know about the disease, most of the COVID-19 will be gone, ”said Dr. . Cohen. .
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