NEW - Infection with common cold coronaviruses can trigger broad cross-immunity against COVID, research by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany finds.
In a new study, the team now compared the specific T cell response to SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase—a non-structural protein—in blood samples of COVID-19 patients and of subjects who had never had COVID, including pre-pandemic samples. In all samples the researchers detected a broad immune system T cell response. The T cells found in the samples from people who had never been infected with SARS-CoV-2 therefore presumably arose in response to an earlier infection with other common cold coronaviruses and cross-reacted in the tests with the SARS-CoV-2-poymerase protein.
https://idw-online.de/de/news814454