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NEW: We know children rarely get sick from the coronavirus. A new study shows that they make a less diverse and weaker set of antibodies than adults do, suggesting that they clear the virus much faster. 1/10 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/health/covid-children-antibodies.html
Why, you may ask, would weaker and narrower set of antibodies mean less severe infection? It seems counter-intuitive. But in fact, many studies have shown that the most severely infected people have much higher levels of antibodies. 2/10
In other words, a really strong immune response can be a sign that earlier immune defenses did not work, and can signal an immune system that is desperately trying to gain mastery over the virus — and sometimes failing. 3/10
In children, the smaller immune response may be all that’s required to beat the virus because they dispatch it quickly. And why is that? 4/10
One possibility is that they have strong innate immunity—designed to protect them from the many, many new pathogens they’ll encounter. I wrote about a study supporting this theory a few weeks ago. 5/10 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/health/coronavirus-children-immune.html
Or it may be that they have some pre-existing immunity from common cold coronaviruses. Or possibly both options contribute. Bottomline: kids clear the virus quickly and don’t need to rely on a heavy-duty antibody response. 6/10
One extremely interesting implication of this study: kids predominantly make IgG antibodies to the spike, S and not to the nucleocapsid, N. And yet: the popular antibody tests made by Roche and Abbott detect only N. 7/10
I wrote about this problem with antibody tests once before, but in the context of N antibodies possibly waning faster than S antibodies. 8/10 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/health/coronvirus-antibody-tests.html
If it now turns out that the tests don’t pick up antibodies in kids at all, it has huge implications for seroprevalence studies, not to mention at an individual level for a family trying to determine whether their kid has already been exposed 9/10
A caveat from this study: kids of age 3 to 18. Which we as we now know is too wide a range to call “children”. But it’s a good start nonetheless. 10/10
w/ @DonnaFarber3, @deeptabhattacha @MarilaGennaro and @BrodinPetter https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/health/covid-children-antibodies.html
w/ @DonnaFarber3, @deeptabhattacha @MarilaGennaro and @BrodinPetter https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/health/covid-children-antibodies.html
