Coronavirus is not fucking about, is it?
Levels of antibodies within the body decline rapidly within just a few months of contracting coronavirus, a new study from Imperial College London has found.
The number of people with antibodies, which protect the body's cells and is a crucial part of the immune system, has also fallen by a quarter in the past three months.
The REACT-2 study has so far seen 350,000 people in the United Kingdom take an antibody test, with the first study of 100,000 people finding that 6 percent of the population have antibodies.
The latest found just 4.4 percent of people tested had detectable antibodies.
Such results have delivered a blow to herd immunity - which, remember, is definitely not the government's real policy of dealing with the virus - due to fears over reinfection once recovery from coronavirus is complete.
"Immunity is waning quite rapidly, we're only three months after our first [round of tests] and we're already showing a 26% decline in antibodies," said Prof Helen Ward, one of the researchers on REACT-2.
While this news sounds dreadful - and it isn't ideal - scientists do believe that in the event of reinfection from coronavirus, the body's "immune memory" should make it milder than the first, even without antibodies.
And in an additional slightly positive news, researchers do not believe the results will impact their hopes of a vaccine.
So there's that.
