Asymptomatic carriage of coronavirus may not be associated with good immunity, but with tolerance to infection, scientists say. This is a state of the body in which the immune system perceives a foreign antigen as its own and does not try to reject it. As a result, the body does not fight the disease, inflammatory and protective processes are not triggered, so the patient has no symptoms.
“The body is trying to neutralize the consequences of a meeting with the pathogen as soon as possible. To do this, two strategies are used: to quickly and effectively get rid of the pathogen itself so that it does not have time to start pathological processes, or to reduce the damage or changes caused by the infection. In the second case, they talk about the formation of tolerance to the disease, “Acting Acting told Izvestia. Andrei Vasin, Director of the Institute of Biomedical Systems and Biotechnology, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.
The cases of three patients with tolerance to coronavirus have already been described by specialists from the College of Pulmonary Medicine and Intensive Care of the Chinese General Hospital in Beijing. These patients were asymptomatic, but the viral presence persisted for extended periods of time.
Previously, a similar phenomenon was described for tuberculosis, where the majority of patients are carriers of infection without visible symptoms, as well as for cholera and other infections.
Read more in the exclusive material of Izvestia:
COVID-carriers: an explanation for the large number of asymptomatic patients found