Study finds common cold can immunize against coronavirus

The key to why some people don’t get Covid-19 in any of its variants could be in the ease of getting the common cold. This is assured by a recent study by Imperial College London recently published in the journal ‘Nature Communications’.

According to this trial, the body’s immune response to the common cold-typical of these winter dates-is able to stop the attempt to ‘enter’ the body of SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as Covid-19.

That is, people with higher T-cell levels from coronaviruses that cause colds are less likely to get Covid-19, a finding that, according to the study’s authors, could be used to develop the model of a universal vaccine against the disease, something they argue would be used to inoculate people only once a year, as is now the case with influenza.

“Exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus does not always lead to infection, and we wanted to understand why. We have discovered that high levels of pre-existing T cells, created by the body when infected with other human coronaviruses such as the common cold, can protect against infection with the Covid-19 virus”, explains Dr Rhia Kundu, first author of the study,

“Although this is an important discovery, it is only a form of protection, and I would like to stress that the best way to protect against Covid-19 is to be fully vaccinated, including the booster dose”.

The immunologist Alfredo Correll explains it differently: “Having passed a cold, we have memory cells that set in motion the entire arsenal of defenses against the Covid-19 without having passed it.

In the study, 52 people lived with the infected for seven days. Of these, 26 were not infected with coronaviruses. The reason is that this group of people had a high presence of these memory cells, called T cells, generated during a cold.