Think You Never Got Covid-19? Thank Your Genes

[onthedarkside]

 

You might know a Covid-19 super-dodger who was infected with the virus but didn’t get sick. Their luck could be written in their genes. 
A DNA variation that affects the immune system can boost a person’s odds of avoiding Covid-19 symptoms, a study found.

 

The work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, helps explain why some people infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 don’t fall ill. 
The T cells of some people with the variation can find and kill the virus without having seen it before, researchers said.

 

That is because the part of the virus their T cells home in on is similar enough to common coronaviruses they have already encountered.  

 

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https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/think-you-never-got-covid-19-thank-your-genes-d61c7507

No paywall archive link

 

[Danderman123]

I took an antibody test early on, before vaccines were available, none detected. 

 

If I was infected, it would have been after I was vaccinated.

 

But some people seem to be naturally resistant to Covid. There has been some discussion about genetic susceptibility to Covid, based on genes passed down from other races, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.

 

So.... consider this: the Covid virus made the jump from animals to humans in China, so perhaps the virus evolved to better infect people of Chinese heritage, and not so much for others. That would explain why Africans were not so impacted early on, since they are the farthest from Chinese genetically. Europeans are almost as far, so may have had more resistance to infection (since people are not 100% any ethnic group, and Chinese have been in Europe since Roman times).

 

It is possible that the virus evolved to take advantage of chunks of the Denisovan genome in Chinese DNA. Fortunately for Thai people, their Denisovan DNA is from a different flavor of Denisovan.

[thaicurious]

13 hours ago, Danderman123 said:

So.... consider this: the Covid virus made the jump from animals to humans in China, so perhaps the virus evolved to better infect people of Chinese heritage, and not so much for others. That would explain why Africans were not so impacted early on, since they are the farthest from Chinese genetically.

 

 

Though Covid-19 continues to evolve now in humans--thus updated vaccination boosters--before jumping over to humans ("jumping over" being the operative phrase), unless you've empirical evidence of this particular covid migrating back & forth between human & animal over the centuries to evolve as you've described, as far as has been scientifically observed & reported, it hadn't originally evolved in humans to do what it's done to human societies once it made the jump, rather it had evolved independently in non-human animals, regardless of the ethnicity of those critters.

 

That doesn't say that, prior to SARS CoV-2, other previous coronaviruses that had made the jump couldn't have prewired various populations to better (or worse off) deal with the ravaging effects of this one.

 

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/origins-coronaviruses

"Research evidence suggests that SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV originated in bats. SARS-CoV then spread from infected civets to people, while MERS-CoV spreads from infected dromedary camels to people. To date, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 which caused the COVID-19 pandemic has not been identified. The scientific evidence thus far suggests that SARS-CoV-2 likely resulted from viral evolution in nature and jumped to people or through some unidentified animal host."