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      The mystery of why some people don’t catch COVID

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 13 September, 2022 - 15:31 · 1 minute

    The mystery of why some people don’t catch COVID

    Enlarge (credit: d3sign via Getty Images )

    We all know a “ COVID virgin ,” or “ Novid ,” someone who has defied all logic in dodging the coronavirus. But beyond judicious caution, sheer luck, or a lack of friends , could the secret to these people’s immunity be found nestled in their genes? And could it hold the key to fighting the virus?

    In the early days of the pandemic, a small, tight-knit community of scientists from around the world set up an international consortium, called the COVID Human Genetic Effort , whose goal was to search for a genetic explanation as to why some people were becoming severely sick with COVID while others got off with a mild case of the sniffles.

    After a while, the group noticed that some people weren’t getting infected at all—despite repeated and intense exposures. The most intriguing cases were the partners of people who became really ill and ended up in intensive care. “We learned about a few spouses of those people that—despite taking care of their husband or wife, without having access to face masks—apparently did not contract infection,” says András Spaan, a clinical microbiologist at Rockefeller University in New York.

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      Omicron subvariants BA.4, BA.5 evade protection from earlier omicron infection

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 2 May, 2022 - 22:44 · 1 minute

    A COVID-19 testing tent stands in Times Square on April 27, 2022, in New York City.

    Enlarge / A COVID-19 testing tent stands in Times Square on April 27, 2022, in New York City. (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt )

    Enduring an initial omicron infection may not spare you from omicron's subvariants, according to preliminary data from South Africa.

    The country is currently at the start of a new wave of infections, primarily driven by two omicron coronavirus subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5. Despite a towering wave of cases from the initial BA.1 omicron variant in December that infected a large chunk of the country, new omicron cases increased 259 percent in the last two weeks, according to data-tracking by The New York Times. Hospitalizations are also up, and deaths have increased by 18 percent.

    Preliminary data posted online last week helps explain why cases are once again surging—the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants can evade neutralizing antibodies generated by infections from BA.1. For the study, led by virologist Alex Sigal of the Africa Health Research Institute, researchers pitted neutralization antibodies from people infected with BA.1 up against BA.4 and BA.5 in a lab. They had samples from 24 unvaccinated people infected with BA.1 and 15 vaccinated people who had also had a BA.1 infection (eight people were vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and seven had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine).

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