Nice Science article came out today that reported T-cells responding to Covid-19 infections. That's pretty good news because T-cells are associated with life-long immunity.
The other nice thing they reported is that testing old pre-Covid-19 blood samples, they found a good chunk of them contained antibodies that responded to some SARS-COV2 surface proteins. They hypothesized this was because those proteins were shared with the other four corona virus strains that circulated world-wide as common colds over the last 15 years. This may well explain why most kids have asymptomatic infections, if they had one of those colds. It also explains why some kids (who never encountered any of the four harmless corona viruses) can get very sick and even die. Kids in daycare and school are very likely to get such colds, which explains why young people usually do not have bad cases. This very same generational pre-exposure effect happened in 1918 also.
I actually hypothesized this very same thing, when I read that some antibody test makers warned their takers that exposure to one of those four strains could cause false positives. Not totally false, as it turns out!
This actually means we have four ready-made "cowpox" viruses we could use to give people immunity to this "smallpox", just like the very first vaccinations ever used.
