If you’ve already had COVID-19, your natural antibodies may last as long as 20 months, a new study suggests.
While this is reassuring, experts are quick to caution that the new findings don’t necessarily mean you’re protected against reinfection and that vaccines remain an important part of a COVID-19 prevention strategy.
“This study tells us that people have antibodies that hang around after COVID-19, but it doesn’t tell us anything about immunity as we don’t know what level of natural antibodies is needed for protection,” says Dr. Otto Yang. He is an immunologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine who reviewed the findings. “People can and do get reinfected when they have natural COVID-19 antibodies.”
For the study, researchers measured levels of antibodies in the blood of 816 unvaccinated U.S. adults. The investigators found them in 99% of those who said they had a positive COVID-19 test result; 55% of folks who believed they had COVID-19 but were never tested; and 11% who didn’t think they ever had COVID-19.
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“Almost everyone with a documented COVID-19 infection had antibodies, and these antibodies seem to persist for quite a long time,” says study author Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. “We really need to start incorporating antibodies from natural immunity into the context of immunity evaluation, moving from vaccine verification to immunity verification.”
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Proceed with caution
Still, he cautions, no level of antibody is a guarantee that you won’t get reinfected.
“There is certainly evidence that antibody levels correlate with … clinical protection, and the same caveats for natural immunity are there for vaccine immunity,” he shares.
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Other studies have shown that natural COVID-19 antibodies wane over time, often in about six months, Yang notes. The new study
