If you’ve had COVID, you might now have it in your blood

As experts have warned, getting COVID once doesn’t mean you can’t get it anymore. Although about 75% of recovered patients produce an antibody response that may offer some protection in the months following infection, researchers still do not know exactly how long this protection lasts, or how well it works.

However, in November 2020, the FDA approved new antibody tests that made it easier for researchers to determine the type of antibody in the blood of a recovered patient. It became evident that in very rare cases some patients naturally produced a protective response that made them almost immune.

These patients, by genetic fluke, have what some call “super antibodies” – the holy grail of viral protection. Read on to find out how these rare super antibodies might protect you from COVID (even if you don’t make them yourself), and to find out more about what your blood can tell you about your COVID case, see If you. have this blood type.You are at high risk for severe COVID.

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For most of the population, COVID or inoculation causes the body to produce so-called “binding antibodies”. These are proteins which bind to the pathogen, but which do not stop their infectivity.

These antibodies alert the immune system to the presence of a new infection, signaling the white blood cells to destroy the threat. And to learn more about COVID protection, check out Dr. Fauci just debunked the 4 biggest myths about the COVID vaccine.

The biggest downside to binding antibodies is that they don’t actually stop the virus from replicating in the body – only neutralizing antibodies do. Neutralizing antibodies bind to the COVID pathogen spike protein and prevent it from entering new cells or replicating rather than relying on the host’s immune system to fight the virus.

You can imagine it like this: The SARS-CoV-2 virus uses a key – the spike protein on its outer layer – to get into healthy cells. The virus then undergoes “a structural change that allows the viral membrane to fuse with the cell membrane. The viral genes then enter the host cell to be copied and produce more virus,” says a report from the National Institutes of Health (NIH ). By binding to advanced proteins, neutralizing antibodies cover the “key” to stopping this process of fusion, entry and replication.

This is exactly what makes these “super antibodies” so great. They neutralize the virus by preventing the COVID pathogen from replicating in healthy cells, quickly isolating harmful cells until they die. Even diluted 10,000 times, these super antibodies are still resistant to COVID-19, explains NBC News. And for more on stopping the spread, check out The CDC Has issued a Warning Against These 4 Face Covers.

While the so-called super antibodies offer excellent protection against COVID-19, they occur after less than five percent of infections, experts say. Some studies place this number lower, with as few as 1% of cured patients producing neutralizing antibodies.

The good news? Scientists are using these rare natural cases to study whether they can be reproduced and mass produced as an antibody treatment for a larger population.

Although therapeutic antibody treatments like the drug Regeneron currently exist on the market, they “usually exist in the body for a short period of time, and their treatment effectiveness depends on various factors,” according to Nature. The few patients who develop these antibodies naturally could lead to significant breakthroughs in providing longer lasting protection to a more widely produced product.