Everybody's talking about Covid immunity. I want to give you an overview of how Covid immunity works. This Blog is all about how your body fights foreign enemies like viruses, bacteria, and fungi but I'm going to use SARS Cov2 the virus that causes Covid-19 as the main example. I'm going to cover the basics about how your body does this. If you've not had a Covid-19 vaccine and you do get infected by SARS Cov2. This slide shows how you would respond and develop Covid immunity. At the top of this slide is the virus itself showing you the surface protein in black which is called the spike protein that will ultimately bind to a human cell allowing the virus to enter?
Inside the virus are the genes that encode for viral replication in other words how it replicates itself reproduces itself if you like. This happens to be an RNA virus and in gray you can see that the section of RNA the codes to make the spike protein. The first step labeled 1 is where the spike protein binds to the H2 receptor on the human cell which is represented by a pink cell wall in this image. Now once inside the cell the virus releases its genes and the RNA goes into the cellular component in the cytoplasm of the cell called a ribosome.
Here at the ribosomes the RNA is translated into a completely new virus which it does many many times? The virus has a component that essentially proofreads the process of translation so that each time it's replicated accurately. This markedly reduces the chance of a variant being made. While we do have variants for this virus relatively speaking we've seen very few given the number of times this virus is replicated in millions of people who have been infected by it. The virus is then expelled from the infected human cell. As this process occurs our adaptive immunity and innate immunity comes alive. This slide shows our Innate Immune System.
These infected cells and immune cells will release cytokines which are proteins that signal for what's going on. Essentially they call in reinforcements. The reinforcements are macrophages which can eat up the virus and as well as dendritic cells which present the foreign antigen which is the Covid-19 virus to other cells. This slide shows our adaptive immunity responding. Our bodies have dendritic cells which identify the virus as foreign and will then carry them and present them to white cells called lymphocytes.
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There are different kinds of lymphocytes including cytotoxic or killer T-cells as well as helper T-cells and B-cells. Now the cytotoxic T-cells recognize these infected cells and they kill them as well as ultimately killing the virus itself. The B-cells are different what they do is they activate an antibody producing cell which we call a plasma cell and this plasma cell will make many different kinds of antibodies to the virus including the spike protein. These different antibodies will subsequently bind to the virus to neutralize it.
Now this complex which is the virus and the antibody put together are then destroyed by your body. The immune response also produces long-lived memory B and memory T-cells that subsequently will recognize the virus. We know based on patients who have had Covid that immunity lasts out at least six to eight months in a high portion of people as I discussed in this video. It may be much longer we just don't have the research that goes out further.
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