Couple of significant announcements over the weekend.  The WHO Special Envoy on COVID-19, Dr. David Nabarro stated that the WHO does -not- advocate lockdowns as a primary control mechanism for SARS-CoV-2, stating “the only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it” in an interview with the Spectator.  You can find the best two minutes of it (including that direct quote) here: https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1314573157827858434?s=20 and the link to the full interview is there as well. 

Very worthwhile to spend some time to Dr. Nabarro’s explanation of whythey do not recommend lockdowns–the economic damage, forcing more people into extreme poverty, can be just as severe a problem, something we said waaaaaaay back when the virus was confined to China, and the ramifications that would have for global economic supply chains back in like Jan/Feb/Mar.

Antibody responses in patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 (again, the group most likely to demonstrate detectable antibodies) were found to have a durable antibody response in a recently published paper.  That is a fancy way of saying that these patients are not likely to be reinfected anytime soon.  Again, as we discussed before, there are papers out there showing durable antibody response to patients who survived SARS-CoV-1 (the original SARS) 17 years ago.  The antibodies to SARS-CoV-1 persisted for over a decade–there is little a priori reason to suspect SARS-CoV-2 will be different, but we only have months of follow up since the virus has only been out in the wild that long.  So far so good though!

Once more, my own personal opinion is that T-cell mediated immunity is even more important than those antibodies, and is also known to be quite durable.

Again, no regular update this week.  50:50 for next.

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