COVID-19 Immunity May Last Years After Recovery, New Study Finds

Researchers at La Jolla Institute in California found that levels of immune cells to COVID-19 slowly start to decline in the months following infection but sufficient amounts linger to block re-infection - perhaps for years.

"This is really good news because we can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who get COVID-19 won't get it again", said Professor David Eyre of the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Population Health, one of the authors of the paper which is in pre-print stages.

Senior World Health Organisation officials welcomed the study's findings. A model conducted by the team of Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist from the Columbia University, there are now an estimated 3.6 million active infections in the country, and are capable of passing enough virus to infect others, reports Xinhua news agency.

Many countries recommend that people with the virus should self-isolate for 10 days, which the authors said is in line with their findings, cautiously covering the period of infectiousness. Why some people become severely ill while the majority of those infected are asymptomatic or very mildly ill is still a major unanswered question.

Nearly all of the survivors developed memory B cells that were capable of churning out new batches of antibodies if they encountered coronavirus again.

Researchers at Oxford studied healthcare workers for 30 weeks since April.

The new study, posted ahead of peer review as a preprint on medRxiv, falls into this camp.

People are most likely to pass on coronavirus within the first five days of having symptoms, an extensive study suggests.

The tests of the three children continued to be negative, but their samples had antibodies against the virus, in quantities similar to those of the parents.

Children usually develop the disease mildly, but the exceptions (severe covid-19 conditions that lead to death) exist.

As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, countries including France, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States are racing to find a vaccine.

Germany reported a record high number of new cases on Friday, upping the pressure for stricter restrictions to tame a second wave before Christmas.

Globally, more than 57.06 million people have been reported to be infected by the coronavirus and 1,362,744 have died.