2) Vitamin D (actually a hormone) is protective against the inflammation response the body can trigger if you get infected. It's a good idea to get regular (daily) sunlight. Dark skinned people such as myself need to be out in the sun for 45 minutes.
3) There are anti-inflammatory foods you should take on a regular basis that will also help to reduce the inflammation response if you get infected and is good in general. With that out of the way, I want to get to immunity. I've long contended that this virus would become endemic like HPV. HPV infects half the population and most people aren't affected by it. Those who are can have issues like cancer (oral, cervical, anal). So I have the expectation that I will (or have) contracted the virus. So if getting infected is a matter of when rather than if, then one has to think of what can make it so that one is not very affected by it. So in that vein we want to know what is protective. Which brings me to this article:
Support for the idea that something resembling SARS-CoV-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation: the low incidence of covid-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam. John Bell, a professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, says everyone thought there would be a flood of cases in Vietnam because the country is right across the border from China. Yet Vietnam has reported only 300 in a population of 100m, and no deaths. The country did not have a great lockdown either, he adds. Nobody could work out what was going on.This is important. I read some material earlier about Vietnam that says they had a robust response to Wuhan which did not involve large scale lock downs, but did involve isolation (totally agree with that).
One explanation, he suggests, is that Vietnam’s population is not as immunologically “naive” as has been assumed. The circulation of other SARS-like viruses could have conferred a generalised immunity to such pathogens. So, if a new one emerged in the region, it was able to take hold in the human population only when it travelled all the way to central China—where people did not have this natural resistance. This would tie in with the idea that infection with one coronavirus can provide protection against others, and that even in countries away from the evolutionary cauldron of South-East Asia part of the population may have some protection against the current pandemic. In particular, there are suggestions that protection might be conferred mainly via part of the immune system called T-cells (which work by killing virus-infected cells) rather than via antibodies (which work by gumming up pathogens). If that is the case, then serological studies which look at antibodies may be underestimating natural immunity. [my underlines]So two points here: 1) This is the third time I've read about how having been infected by a Coronavirus in the past, may confer immunity (for however long) against Wuhan. 2) The discussion of T-cells. You hear a lot about anti-bodies and how people who don't have serious symptoms tend to not produce any or a lot of anti-bodies. However; if T-cells can recognize and deal with the virus, then anti-body tests tell a very distorted picture. It also means that herd immunity may be far closer than we think.
Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, argues that natural immunity to covid-19 is conferred by infections with seasonal coronaviruses. If correct, this has implications for the level of vaccination needed to reach herd immunity. It is widely assumed that over 50% of people need to be vaccinated to prevent a resurgence of SARS-CoV-2. In a preprint released on July 15th Dr Gupta says this figure could be much lower if a significant part of the population is already resistant to infection.I've hear numbers as low as 20%. If that is the case, NY/NJ and Sweden are probably at herd immunity. Doesn't mean nobody gets infected, just means you have very, very low numbers. We will know this for certain come late October. If NY/NJ and Sweden do not see a spike in cases and deaths then it will be strong evidence for herd immunity AND it will show that the current "spikes" in infections in various southern and western US states will be a good thing in the long term.
