Indy Myopain

Antibody Responses 8 Months after Asymptomatic or Mild SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Concern about the usefulness of population-based seroprevalence studies has been raised because rapidly waning immunity may lead to a substantial number of false-negative immunoassay results (2). However, in this study, we confirmed that rates of antibody positivity according to 3 commercial kits was still high at 8 months after infection, even in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic participants (69.0%–91.4%). Rates differed according to immunoassay methods or manufacturers, thereby explaining differences in rates between the studies (2,8).  Note: My wife and I still have very high IGG SARS-CoV-2 antibodies following 10 months post infection and we test negative for Virus.

our results show that a serosurvey is useful even 8 months after an outbreak if an appropriate binding immunoassay format like an anti-N pan-Ig ECLIA is used. A serosurvey that uses a binding immunoassay can determine the infected proportion of the population and also the proportion of infections detected by PCR, thus enabling inference of the infection-fatality ratio rather than just the case-fatality ratio; however, it cannot accurately assess population immunity because it is not a functional immunoassay for detecting neutralizing activity.

Neutralizing activity, a functional aspect of antibodies, is essential for protection from reinfection and screening potential convalescent plasma therapy donors (8). In our study, neutralizing activity was detected in 53.4% of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic participants after 8 months of infection, which was considerably lower than the rate of positivity detected by binding immunoassays such as ECLIA or ELISAs. This finding is not surprising because neutralizing activity is affected by various factors, including the antigen specificity and the amount of existing antibody. However, confirming sVNT results by conventional VNT might be needed, although the reported specificity (100%) and sensitivity (98%–98.9%) of sVNT showed good correlation with conventional VNT (5). A recently published study of convalescent plasma therapy found detectable neutralizing antibodies in 63.6% persons a median of 41 days after PCR-confirmed diagnosis of mild COVID-19 (11). Click here for the rest of the Story and bibliography