A NEW study of recovered coronavirus patients found that patients develop different levels of antibodies to the virus. Ten patients of the 130 studied — 8 percent — didn’t have any detectable coronavirus antibodies in their systems. The study found that elderly and middle-aged people developed higher levels of antibodies.

A new study from Chinese scientists on 130 recovered COVID-19 patients is raising questions about the extent to which people develop immunity to the virus.

The paper — a pre-print that has not been peer-reviewed yet — found that patients produced differing levels of antibodies. But roughly 8 percent of the patients studied didn’t develop any detectable antibodies at all.

“What this will mean to herd immunity will require more data from other parts of the world,” Huang Jinghe, the leader of the research team behind the report, said, according to the South China Morning Post.

Interestingly, the levels of antibodies patients produced seemed to correlate with their ages: Middle-aged and elderly recovered patients had higher levels of antibodies. Nine of the 10 of the patients who did not develop detectable levels of coronavirus antibodies were 40 years old or younger.

Finding out more about how antibodies to the virus work will have major implications for both vaccine development and the potential for herd immunity.

The study, from researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai, took blood samples from 175 coronavirus patients who had recovered at Shanghai hospitals and who’d had “mild” symptoms. The participants ranged in ages from 16 to 68.

The researchers measured the levels of neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) in each patient’s blood, and found that recovered elderly patients developed significantly higher levels of antibodies than younger patients did. (SD-Agencies)