Young people who have had covid to get reinfected for £5k

[Canyouexplainhowthatis]

news.sky.com/story/covid-19-young-people-who-have-had-coronavirus-are-going-to-be-deliberately-exposed-to-the-virus-for-second-time-12279903

Cant say I’d go for it had I had Covid already, but I know a few people who may!

[Shelovesamystery]

I'd happily do this for £5k but I couldn't deal with the logistics of being quarantined in hospital for 17 days. If I didn't have dc's and was able to take 17 days off work without a problem then yes.

[LizzieMacQueen]

I'm glad they are conducting this trial but I wish they'd focus on why such a large % get zero to no symptoms and the rest are so massively affected. Ditto with the vaccine side effects.

Probably they already are ?

[Canyouexplainhowthatis]

@LizzieMacQueen I would guess this is always being looked into.

[bookworm1632]

@LizzieMacQueen

I'm glad they are conducting this trial but I wish they'd focus on why such a large % get zero to no symptoms and the rest are so massively affected. Ditto with the vaccine side effects.

Probably they already are ?

Err - they kind of are in this trial lol.

There's a hypothesis that a small initial viral load leads to an asymptomatic/mild case - that's being investigated here.

Incidentally, the % with NO symptoms is massively overstated by the press - they're reporting that a large % test +ve without symptoms ON THE DAY of the test. This is not unexpected given the long incubation period for the virus. In reality the vast majority of these people go on to develop symptoms later.

Current estimates are that asymptomatic infections are below 20%
www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4851


As to whether this is surprising or not, the thing is, it's never been investigated before with any other disease. e.g. My suspicion has long been that a large number of people develop flu each year without realising it, because otherwise how would the virus propogate?

[Utini]

@bookworm1632 you might be interested in this report about flu, where a random selection of people were tested for antibodies before and after flu season for 5 years, to see if they'd been infected.

It showed that 18% of people were infected each year, but only 23% of those infected showed symptoms.

www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/03/uk-flu-study-many-are-infected-few-are-sick

I'd love to know why so many people are asymptomatic - I don't think it's random chance whether you show symptoms or not, as I've had the flu several times in my life, including two years running recently (one of those years I even had the flu jab). I seem to get hit hard by colds and other infections too, and have a couple of autoimmune diseases (not on any immune suppressants though), so my immune system has obviously gone a bit wrong!

My sister on the other hand is so rarely ill and has only had symptomatic flu once.

[bookworm1632]

[quote Utini]@bookworm1632 you might be interested in this report about flu, where a random selection of people were tested for antibodies before and after flu season for 5 years, to see if they'd been infected.

It showed that 18% of people were infected each year, but only 23% of those infected showed symptoms.

www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/03/uk-flu-study-many-are-infected-few-are-sick

I'd love to know why so many people are asymptomatic - I don't think it's random chance whether you show symptoms or not, as I've had the flu several times in my life, including two years running recently (one of those years I even had the flu jab). I seem to get hit hard by colds and other infections too, and have a couple of autoimmune diseases (not on any immune suppressants though), so my immune system has obviously gone a bit wrong!

My sister on the other hand is so rarely ill and has only had symptomatic flu once.[/quote]
Thanks for that - interesting.

I'm a bit like you, I get every cold that goes around, probably in part because my hobby is social dancing. Yet I've only had flu - as in what people would call flu - fever, aches all over etc, three times in my life that I can recall, the last of which was well over 10 years ago.

I suspect that with influenza, previous exposure to similar strains may play a part - clearly that's not the case with covid - people have speculated that a previous "cold" may offer enough similarity to confer partial immunity, but that would only make sense if asymptomatic infections correlated with low viral loads, and they don't - particularly in children who frequently show very high viral loads without any symptoms.

There may be more than one mechanism at play, but initial viral load seems fairly widely accepted as a key factor - hopefully these challenge trials will help shed some more light on this.

[Tootsey11]

But surely the results are not going to be very helpful. They are only reinfecting the young and healthy.

Is it not more important to see how someone reacts who is say middle aged/elderly and how they cope with it, their immune system can tolerate it.

[oldegg123]

@Tootsey11

But surely the results are not going to be very helpful. They are only reinfecting the young and healthy.

Is it not more important to see how someone reacts who is say middle aged/elderly and how they cope with it, their immune system can tolerate it.

@Tootsey11 from their website - bolded bits are what they hope to learn from the study

Helen McShane, Professor of Vaccinology at the Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford and Chief Investigator on the study said, ‘Challenge studies tell us things that other studies cannot because, unlike natural infection, they are tightly controlled. When we re-infect these participants, we will know exactly how their immune system has reacted to the first COVID infection, exactly when the second infection occurs, and exactly how much virus they got. As well as enhancing our basic understanding, this may help us to design tests that can accurately predict whether people are protected.

‘In phase two, we will explore two different things. First, we will define very carefully the baseline immune response in the volunteers, before we infect them. We will then infect them with the dose of virus chosen from the first study and measure how much virus we can detect after infection. We will then be able to understand what kind of immune responses protect against re-infection. Second, we will measure the immune response at several time points after infection so we can understand what immune response is generated by the virus.

‘A challenge study allows us to make these measurements very precisely because we know exactly when someone is infected. The information from this work will allow us to design better vaccines and treatments, and also to understand if people are protected after having COVID, and for how long.’

The study is funded by the Wellcome Trust. Shobana Balasingam, Vaccines Senior Research Advisor at Wellcome, said, ‘There are still many unknowns surrounding this virus and human infections studies can enable us to learn a lot about Covid-19. This study has the potential to transform our understanding by providing high-quality data on how our immune system responds to a second infection with this virus.

‘The findings could have important implications for how we handle Covid-19 in the future, and inform not just vaccine development but also research into the range of effective treatments that are also urgently needed. Keeping up the pace of scientific research and development, through crucial studies such as this remain the only way we will truly get ahead of this pandemic and bring it under control.’

[Canyouexplainhowthatis]

That’s interesting about the flu. Having had symptomatic flu twice, maybe three times in my life, I thought my immune system was maybe lacking. Thinking about it now though, I’m 33 and have been around children my entire life as well as working since the age of 14 - so I just have been in contact with it many times!

[Canyouexplainhowthatis]

must*