Positively Surprised that T-Cell Immunity is Providing a Level of Disease Protection — Sunetra Gupta
Channel: Hyper Wellbeing
Date: 2020-08-17

Twitter @hyperwellbeing

"My personal reaction to the news that this that new virus had been detected, another coronavirus was that oh well we're not all going to die from it because we've all been repeatedly infected with other coronaviruses.

But, I assumed that that T-cell immunity, or antibody mediated immunity to shared epidemics would be sufficient to protect from disease.

I wouldn't have thought that it would actually protect from infection, but in fact and this is why one needs to carry on learning, as fast as we can through an epidemic, through a pandemic.

It turns out that, or it seems very very likely that these responses particularly the T-cell responses actually have an effect on infection, which is fantastic news and that's probably once you factor that into the into our thinking, everything everything starts to make sense the low rates of seropositivity, the fact that it's not um re-emerging upon easing of lockdown in many areas, the fact that it is apparently re-emerging in some areas but there are no deaths, all of this starts to make sense once you put that in the mix"

— Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, University of Oxford)

---
If you liked this clip, you may like our 'Quantified Health, Wellness & Aging' podcast, please see: https://podcast.hyperwellbeing.com/


Video sourced from 'The COVID-19 Science and Policy Symposium' - https://www.covidplanb.co.nz/event/ - entire event video -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf_zWtdKKKQ

---
Sekine T, Perez-Potti A, Rivera-Ballesteros O, et al. (2020). Robust T
cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic or mild
COVID-19. Cell.

Grifoni A, Weiskopf D, Ramirez SI, et al. (2020). Targets of T Cell
Responses to SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus in Humans with COVID-19 Disease and
Unexposed Individuals. Cell.

Mateus J, Grifoni A, Tarke A, et al. (2020). Selective and
cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes in unexposed humans. Science.

Braun J, Loyal L, Frentsch M, et al. (2020). SARS-CoV-2-reactive T cells in healthy donors and patients with COVID-19. Nature.

Le Bert N, Tan AT, Kunasegaran K, et al. (2020). SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell immunity in cases of COVID-19 and SARS, and uninfected controls. Nature.