The emerging idea is that the body maintains reserve armies of antibody-producing cells in addition to the original cells that responded to the initial invasion by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. “Essentially, the immune system is trying to get ahead of the virus,” says Michel Nussenzweig, an immunologist at the Rockefeller University, who conducted some recent studies that tracked this phenomenon. What this means, scientists think, is that the immune system might have evolved its own way of dealing with variants. By studying the blood of COVID survivors and people who have been vaccinated, immunologists are learning that some of our immune system cells-which remember past infections and react to them-might have their own abilities to change, countering mutations in the virus. But now scientists are starting to find some signs of hope on the human side of this microbe-host interaction. A lot of worry has been triggered by discoveries that variants of the pandemic-causing coronavirus can be more infectious than the original.
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