A Minimalist Strategy Towards Temporarily Defining Protection for COVID-19
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COVID-19
A Minimalist Strategy Towards Temporarily Defining Protection for COVID-19 Nevio Cimolai 1,2 Accepted: 17 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Until either efficacious therapy or vaccination for COVID-19 is achieved, there will be a need to regain world economic stability while yet controlling the pandemic with current approaches. For those infected thus far, there is a prevailing perspective that devising recognition for protective immunity will progressively allow segments of society to return to some functionality more than is existing. At this time, the best correlates with protection from natural coronavirus infections are systemic neutralizing antibody and mucosal IgA. Serum neutralizing antibody more easily fulfills the latter requisite, but current live virus methods for neutralization prevent large-scale application. It is conceivable that the exposure of previously infected individuals can allow for the definition of protective thresholds of neutralizing antibody. Thereafter, many other antibody assays will be able to screen for surrogate protection after correlations with protective neutralizing antibody are made. Specificity of common antibody tests would benefit from confirmatory blocking systems or confirmatory immunoblotting fingerprints with well-defined antigen(s). The opportunity for the scientific community to make these assessments is evident in the current context of the COVID-19 epidemic given the large numbers of infected individuals worldwide. Such information will also be vital to guide vaccine development and/or immunotherapy. Keywords COVID-19 . Coronavirus . Protection . Seroepidemiology . Transmission
Introduction The clinical burden of COVID-19 in the current pandemic is undoubtedly considerable, but the socioeconomic burden must equally weigh in determining how the world will move forward until either an effective chemotherapy and/or vaccine is devised [1]. Pending that such success in treatment and/or prevention are achieved, the continuous or relapsing lockdown of societies and hence economies has the potential to cause more damage than may be initially apparent [2]. Indeed, it could be prognosticated that the relative economic standstill may cause more damage to humanity than the disease itself. Many countries have attempted to partially restore This article is part of the Topical Collection on Covid-19 * Nevio Cimolai [email protected] 1
Faculty of Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
2
Children’s and Women’s Health Centre of British Columbia, 4480 Oak Street, Vancouver BC V6H3V4, Canada
pre-pandemic functions only to experience yet second waves of increasing infections during July and August, 2020. To some, the answer may be to tolerate the expectations of herd immunity with lesser in the way of resistance to infection spread [3, 4]. To others at the other end of the spectrum, a more cautious approach has been to create the best environment for disease prevention while patching holes for or propping up failure
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