Genuinely puzzled at antibody result

[TooOwls]

NHS staff testing, came back negative.

Frontline worker, saw covid patients before PPE was issued.

On top of that my partner came to self isolate with me. After 3 days he became unwell and tested positive for Covid. During those days we had shared a bed, had sex, exchanged saliva etc etc!

How have I managed to not catch it? I’m really really puzzled, I was sure I must have had it asymptomatically

@king you cannot know the partners did not catch it, symptomless - as is often the case - nor produced antibodies. All the scientists concur that there are plenty invisible covids who are infectious.

I do know greenstream because they were tested. Though I realise some people are symptom less or get it very mildly.

Only really works if you've had symptoms in the 2 weeks prior to testing

@justforthecake, i'm not sure thats true for the antibody test is it?

My friend her partner tested positive and was very ill with it. She is a health worker so recently had her antibody test and thought it would come back as positive but was shocked to see it as negative .

Op think of Charles and camilla. He had it she didn’t.

The German heidenberg study showed even living in the same house with several infected people you have a fifty fifty of catching it.

I suspect strongly this is exactly what it says on the tin. You didn’t catch it.

Surely if antibodies aren’t readily produced and we’re not immune from it, even if we’ve already had it, a vaccine is unlikely to work?

So if certain people are being closely exposed to it and not catching it, what is different about their body chemistry and can that be replicated?

@greenstream some of the language in that article is a bit technical for me but will try to wade through it.

The big question is did the Wuhan lab continue these experiments and are we now experiencing the results or did someoneeat a the wrong bat?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-alll^

SARS-CoV-2 .....Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three.^
But in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all.
.....
That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k),
which describes how much a disease clusters.

The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people
.....
in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1
“Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,”

This isn't the first time I've heard of only one partner getting it even when sharing a bed.
I am honestly beginning to think that despite what a nasty disease it can cause the virus isn't actually as easily transmitted as we have been led to believe in the generally healthy population. Maybe washing our hands was always enough?

Washing our hands can’t have been enough or otherwise there wouldn’t have been millions of cases and if someone didn’t catch it from her infected partner during sex then a touch of a handle that’s been touched 30 minutes ago by someone else wouldn’t spread it.

My thinking is that some people are naturally better able to fight it off before the infection takes hold than others (effective T cells) and some who are infected don’t shed much virus and aren’t very infectious. If this is the case, although that would explain why someone wouldn’t catch it, we don’t know who will easily fight it and who is particularly infectious.... so Covid is infectious compared enough to cause a worldwide pandemic and rapid exponential growth, but infectiousness isn’t uniform.

"Only 10 per cent of people who are infected with the coronavirus develop antibodies”, a professor claims.

I find this hard to believe given 25% or NYers have tested positive for antibodies. The maths just don’t work! I’ll try and find the research.

@JimMaxwellantheshippingforcast Just a thought, if you have it and clear it with a t-cell response, if you were to catch it again would your bodies response be the same or would the possibility of serious illness still be there?

Immunity is looking increasingly likely. The T-Cell response seems to lead to changes in CD-4 which is an indication of long-term immunity after an infection. There is also an indication that this immunity may be to all coronaviruses, not just SARS-Cov-2.

Professor Sikora is an oncologist not an epidemiologist and a crank one at that.
Search for him on twitter and read all the controversy. I wouldn't trust anything he has to say about it.

Ds tested positive three weeks ago, both me & my mum had been taking prescription strength Vitamin D as we had both had blood test results saying we were deficient, lived in the same house & didn't really stay away from him that much, neither of us caught it, even though my mum is 81 & I've got ME/CFS, am morbidly obese, plus lots of other conditions. I'm not saying the Vitamin D helped but we have both been on it all winter, ds had Norovirus, flu & heavy colds over the winter & neither of us caught anything.

@scrappydappydoooooo so you're better off having a t-cell response rather than an antibody response?
So based on that, if you have had a t-cell response to the other 4 human coronaviruses I wonder if that would help you with this one 🤔

So does this mean if 17% of Londoners tested positive for Coronavirus antibodies, the true percentage of infected is much higher than 17%, due to the T-Cell response?

Well logic says yes, but who knows

I think you have to keep testing the same person and not everyone who had it will have antibodies anyway and some of the tests don 't seem very good.

Or the tests are incorrect. This just landed in my in box.

www.gov.uk/drug-device-alerts/results-from-laboratory-based-tests-for-covid-19-antibodies-using-capillary-blood-sample-collection-kits-may-not-be-reliable-mda-2020-015

I think because of the extreme effect this has had on our lives we have an exaggerated view of how contagious it is. Just because you are in close contact with an infectious person does not give your a 100% risk of catching it.