Highlights:

Australian researchers find the immune response to Covid-19

Till Saturday (1600 IST) has registered more than 279,320 confirmed infections and over 11,587 deaths. But the good news is approx 92,913 recovered too.

The response is similar to in the case of flu.

The finding will help to develop the vaccine and trace the symptoms in patients.

If you want to defeat your enemy you must understand its moves. On Tuesday Australian researchers said that they had mapped the body’s immune response to the novel coronavirus, in a potential breakthrough in the fight against the global pandemic.

Now for the first time, researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity came to know, how the human immune system fight with this virus? They found the immune system response is in the same way as in the case of flu. The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine

Researchers are in a race against time to try to find a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, which till Saturday has registered more than 279,320 confirmed infections and over 11,587 deaths. But approx 92,913 recovered too, the data is taken from Worldometers.info.

“We have verifiable results in more patients with moderate disease. Now we can ask the question: what is different or missing in people who are fatally ill?”

Related: Some people who recover from Coronavirus might have a drop of about 20-30% in lung function

The two practical applications findings are:

It will help virologists develop a vaccine because the goal in vaccination is to replicate the body’s natural immune response to viruses.

The team identified four distinct immune-cell populations in the COVID-19 patient’s blood as she underwent recovery. Kedzierska said these were “very similar to what we see in patients with influenza”.

Although it kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, a broadly effective vaccine exists against influenza.

2. It will also help in screening. These observations could also help health authorities make better predictions in future disease outbreaks about who is most at risk.

This could help to predict the risk in infected persons, which patients are likely to have mild symptoms and which are at risk of dying.

The majority of COVID-19 deaths occur in patients who are elderly or have existing medical conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes.

Children, on the other hand, appear to show few or no symptoms. Kedzierska said more research was needed to work out why, but the immune system does naturally slow down as people age.

What is the effect of coronavirus on body’s immunity

Getting the body to turn on the immune system to fight off a disease like Coronavirus is important. In 2003 due to SARS, many people died because of their body’s poor immune response.

“Our study is an important step in understanding how our body recovers from a mild to moderate infection of COVID-19,” Professor Kedzierska said.

Eight out of 10 people who contract coronavirus will have mild to moderate symptoms. Using the new research, the scientists are hoping to use markers in the blood to screen patients to see if they are likely to develop more serious symptoms.

“Then you could say upfront, this would be a severe case, or this will probably be a milder case,” Dr van de Sandt said. “Then you could alter their care to what the patient might need.”

But it is too early to tell whether getting COVID-19 once gives you immunity from getting it again.

“We know we can generate immune responses to the virus,” Professor Kedzierska said. “The next question is whether that immune response gives people immunity for weeks or months or years so we are protected.”

She further concluded that scientists would only know this after checking in with patients in the coming months.

This was first reported by ABC News