My boys and I have been tracking our Covid-19 antibody levels for six months now. We began getting tested for antibody levels in February when my youngest son was sent home after having close contact with someone at his school who was diagnosed with Covid-19.
The school’s policy was to send home any unvaccinated child to quarantine for five days if they had not had Covid-19 within 90 days. Vaccinated children who were in close contact with a child with Covid-19 did not have to quarantine for five days, but rather were required to wear a mask in school.
I saw this also 90-day policy also embedded into the State Department policy when I was traveling back from Mexico in April 2022. It said that you do not need a negative Covid-19 test if you have documentation that you've had Covid-19 within 90 days and a doctor's note clearing you to travel.
Well, both the school’s policy and the State Department’s policy have been updated and thankfully no longer include any mention of 90 days. The State Department updated their policy in mid-June when they dropped the requirement for people to have a negative Covid test to return into the country.
These policy updates are important because both were consensus-driven policies and not based on what the science says. The policies implied that you lose your natural immunity in 90 days, which is simply not true.
Science says that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-mediated immunity. And this isn’t just with Covid-19; it’s with any virus. When your body sees a virus, it creates an immune response to deal with it. And this results in not only antibodies that block the viral binding site as illustrated above, but also memory T-cells and memory B-cells that can be called up again if and when the virus is reintroduced into the system.
This is what happened to my oldest son in May and to my youngest son and me in June when our antibody levels skyrocketed. We had the Delta variant in November and had many of the symptoms. This was when I was in bed for six days. We had the Omicron variant in January. Here, we had very few symptoms and took it easy for a day before rebounding. In May and June, we had the Omicron BA2 variant and were asymptomatic—not realizing we had the virus until we received our antibody tests.
Each Covid variant has a slightly different way it binds to the ACE-2 receptor. So, our antibodies to the Delta variant blocked most of the binding of the Omicron variant, but not all. Similarly, having antibodies to both the Delta and Omicron variants allowed for even more blocking of the binding of the Omicron BA2 binding site to the ACE-2 receptor, but not all.
In our case, we had some antibodies already still in our blood stream, but our memory cells created even more of them when the variants were introduced.
So, what were our July results?
So, my antibodies dropped 6%. My youngest son’s antibodies dropped 48%. My oldest son’s antibodies increased 10%. I’m not sure why my youngest son’s levels dropped so much or why my oldest son’s levels went up. We will continue to measure our antibody levels every month and see when they end up dropping. Stay tuned for our next antibody level update!
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Wow, how interesting. If you’d be willing to share, what labs are you using? I’m curious about T-cell activity, as my son and I had covid at the very beginning, in 2019/20 the one initially in California—alpha or beta which was different genetically from the NY/Italy variant which I believe was the Gamma. If we had any other it was Omicron last summer, and presented as the sniffles, and a headache for a day or so, but we never tested, we are curious about T/B cells and the only one I know of is T-detect and a bit $$$. Thanks!