Since many people who have had covid-19 are found not to have any antibodies to it after they have recovered, including myself, is it possible that the T-cell response was so good that it took care of the disease before the body could build up an antibody response?

Anyway, that's off of the top of my head. I have no idea how fast the body can produce T-cells and how fast it can produce antibodies. If it can produce antibodies faster than T-cells, then my question is probably nonsense.

On the other hand, it would seem to me that a fast T-cell response could be a very good thing for a wide variety of diseases.

I'm interested in the reply from doctors and don't mean to hijack the thread, but also didn't want to create a new thread.


I hadn't looked for any antibody studies in a while, felt like people were saying they aren't as useful as I had hoped they would be a couple months ago. Maybe your info - had the illness but no antibodies - confirms the lack of value of antibody tests. However, I did see this one - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31483-5/fulltext - from Spain. I was disappointed in the ~5% number, that's much lower than I would have guessed given NYC had numbers around 20%. Does that mean still a large number of Spaniards will be infected? Does it explain NYC's high death rate and just the fact they are ahead of other ares due to population density and poor distancing? I just don't know.

If we believe the study above really represents an accurate count of people in Spain who have had the virus, as well as trust their death totals, then you would take their current death count (28,403) and divide it by their total population (46,800,000) times the % positive rate found in the study (5%), in order to determine IFR. If all the numbers were accurate it would be a 1.2% IFR. That's higher than what I had believed, I was settling in on a 0.3-0.7 % IFR with 0.4% my current feeling.

I hope the numbers and assumptions I use above are wrong due to what you are saying in your post - you could have had the virus and still no have a positive antibody test due to T cell factor. That would mean the people who have had the virus in Spain would be their population * a number greater, hopefully much greater, than the 5% for the antibody test conducted.

Complete Idiot said:

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I'm interested in the reply from doctors and don't mean to hijack the thread, but also didn't want to create a new thread.


I hadn't looked for any antibody studies in a while, felt like people were saying they aren't as useful as I had hoped they would be a couple months ago. Maybe your info - had the illness but no antibodies - confirms the lack of value of antibody tests. However, I did see this one - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31483-5/fulltext - from Spain. I was disappointed in the ~5% number, that's much lower than I would have guessed given NYC had numbers around 20%. Does that mean still a large number of Spaniards will be infected? Does it explain NYC's high death rate and just the fact they are ahead of other ares due to population density and poor distancing? I just don't know.

If we believe the study above really represents an accurate count of people in Spain who have had the virus, as well as trust their death totals, then you would take their current death count (28,403) and divide it by their total population (46,800,000) times the % positive rate found in the study (5%), in order to determine IFR. If all the numbers were accurate it would be a 1.2% IFR. That's higher than what I had believed, I was settling in on a 0.3-0.7 % IFR with 0.4% my current feeling.

I hope the numbers and assumptions I use above are wrong due to what you are saying in your post - you could have had the virus and still no have a positive antibody test due to T cell factor. That would mean the people who have had the virus in Spain would be their population * a number greater, hopefully much greater, than the 5% for the antibody test conducted.

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The figures I've seen for Sweden in May had about 20% who had or have had covid-19, but only 7% with antibodies!

I know nearly nothing about T-cells. I've read up a little on them the last couple of days but still don't know much at all about them other than how to pronounce "T-cells".

If T-cells are as powerful as they seem to be, then the ability for the body to quickly react to a novel virus and fight it off with T-cells seems to be like it could be a good thing, but I have no idea if I'm on the right or wrong track thinking about it like that.