OMG. Who sent this thing, The Terminator?! (Work just published in @NatureMedicine shows antibody levels decline quickly in 2-3 months across both symptomatic and asymptomatic patients.) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-antibody-idUSKBN23T1CJ?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social

Caveat: the total number of patients studied was small...so we’ll see.

Will also matter if protective immunity is not only antibody-based, as well as efficacy of vaccine efforts.

Clearly, there’s still a lot that we don’t know. There could still be protective immunity. They really need to challenge or re-infect individuals to see if they get sick again...

Which is much lower than the overall 70% decline of general antibody response.

3/n: as compared to 96.8% (30/31) and 62.2% (23/37) of symptomatic. 40% of asymptomatic became seronegative and 12.9% of symptomatic became IgG negative in the early phase. Asymptomatic had lower levels of 18 pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines.” All suggesting lower protection.

Thankfully, also: “For neutralising serum antibodies, the median percentage of decrease for symptomatic individuals was 11.7%, while for asymptomatic individuals it was 8.3%.”

Posted in a sub thread: direct from the paper that frankly paints a worse picture than this article: 1/n “...duration of viral shedding in the asymptomatic group was 19 d. This group had a significantly longer duration of viral shedding than the symptomatic group (P = 0.028).”

2/n: virus-specific IgG levels in the asymptomatic group were significantly lower relative to the symptomatic group in the acute phase. Of asymptomatic: 93.3% (28/30) and 81.1% (30/37) had reduction in IgG and neutralizing antibody levels, respectively, during the early phase