Likelihood of severe and long Covid may be established soon after infection - Daily Mail

How swiftly a person's immune system responds following infection with the coronavirus plays a crucial role in determining disease severity, a study shows.

Cambridge researchers studied 207 people who tested positive for Covid-19 over a three-month period and found those with no symptoms or mild cases mounted a robust immune response soon after getting infected.

But the people with severe cases who required hospitalisation had an impaired immune response, which led to a delayed and weakened attempt to fight the virus. .

Scientists say abnormalities in immune cells may be behind the slack response to viral infection as well as the body's inflammatory response, and may contribute to severe disease and also 'long Covid'.

How swiftly a person's immune system responds following infection with the coronavirus plays a crucial role in determining disease severity, a study shows (file).

Researchers found evidence of an early, robust adaptive immune response in those infected individuals whose disease was asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic.

An adaptive immune response is when the immune system identifies an infection and then produces T cells, B cells and antibodies specific to the virus to fight back.

These people produced the immune components in larger numbers than patients with more severe Covid-19, and within the first week of infection

In patients who needed to be admitted to hospital, the early adaptive immune response was delayed, and profound abnormalities in a number of white cell subsets were present

Researchers say this suggests an abnormal inflammatory component to the immune response is present even around the time of diagnosis in individuals who progress to severe disease