Coronavirus: Swiss doctor claims COVID-19 is retreating
A new essay by a prominent immunologist suggests the virus is actually retreating and that for most of us, our bodies are far more capable of fighting it off than first thought, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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What if everything we knew – or thought we knew – about COVID-19 was wrong?
We already know that many of the original models used to project the spread and deadliness of coronavirus were out in many cases by an order of magnitude – leading to harsh and expensive lockdowns in many European countries and American states that did little to quell the virus.
But now one Swiss expert is calling into question much of what policymakers claim to know about immunity, testing, and even whether the virus was started in a lab.
Meet Beda M Stadler, who for much of his career was director of the Institute for Immunology at Switzerland’s Bern University.
In a provocative article entitled, “Coronavirus: Why everyone was wrong”, published last month in the Swiss magazine World Week, Stadler suggests that pretty much everything the world has done to fight the coronavirus has been wrong – right down to calling it a “novel”, or new, coronavirus.
“At the end of 2019 a coronavirus, which was considered novel, was detected in China,” writes Stadler in his essay, which has been making waves ever since an English translation dropped on the website Medium.com on Monday.
“When the gene sequence, i.e. the blueprint of this virus, was identified and was given a similar name to the 2002 identified Sars, i.e. SARS-CoV-2 (the virus strain that causes COVID-19), we should have already asked ourselves then how far (COVD-19) is related to other coronaviruses, which can make human beings sick.”
According to Stadler, this is the key question the world should have been asking – but, he writes, “instead we discussed from which animal as part of a Chinese menu the virus might have sprung.”
If Stadler is right, this has powerful implications for the world as we fight to find the balance between public health restrictions and economic needs.
That’s because if the virus is not as new as we think, it also means that we probably have far greater immunity to the virus than previous thought.
Noting that the first commercially available tests for COVID-19 were engineered from old antibody tests originally designed to detect SARS, Sadler notes that the supposedly “new” coronavirus “had a less significant impact in areas in China where Sars-1 had previously raged.”
Sadler’s conclusion?
“This is clear evidence urgently suggesting that our immune system considers Sars-1 and Sars-Cov-2 at least partially identical and that one virus could probably protect us from the other.”
Sadler says that he is backed up by a German study published in April which found that 34 per cent of people who had never been near the virus nonetheless showed T-cell, or white blood cell, immunity against it.
Likewise, Sadler cites work by Stanford University’s John Ioannidis which also found that “immunity against SARS-CoV-2, measured in the form of antibodies, is much higher than previously thought.”
And while Sadler is careful to note that his observations are local to Switzerland, his paper also suggests that we may very well be dealing with a seasonal bug.
If this is the case, it might at least partially explain why Australia had such a comparatively easy experience of the coronavirus over our summer even as it raged across China, Europe and the United States.
Of course, some will also point to huge increases in case numbers in places like Florida, where it is the height of summer, as proof Stadler is wrong.
But for a number of weeks now, doctors have also been noting that even as infections rise, spurred on not so much by planned reopenings as very non-socially distanced protest marches and riots, the number of deaths have still remained relatively steady.
This fact is controversial to some, including many in the American media who are politically invested in portraying loosening lockdowns as tantamount to murder.
One Chicago Tribune columnist even penned an op-ed under the headline, “A lower COVID-19 death rate is nothing to celebrate”.
But while there are various theories to explain this, including higher test numbers and lower median ages of those getting positive results, Stadler suggests something else.
Writes Stadler, “if we do a … test on an immune person, it is not a virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral genome. “
“The test comes back positive for as long as there are tiny shattered parts of the virus left. Correct: Even if the infectious viruses are long dead, a corona test can come back positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction of the viral genetic material enough (to be detected).”
In other words, your body could have fought off the virus successfully, and you could still test positive – even if you are clear.
This is what happened when it was incorrectly reported earlier this year that 200 South Koreans had been infected with the virus “twice”.
But perhaps Stadler’s most controversial suggestion is that asymptomatic sufferers are actually not all that dangerous.
Stadler explains: “If a virus is growing anywhere in the body, also in the throat, it means that human cells decease. When [human] cells decease, the immune system is alerted immediately and an infection is caused.”
Which is pretty hard to miss, he wrote.
“One of five cardinal symptoms of an infection is pain. It is understandable that those afflicted by COVID-19 might not remember that initial scratchy throat and then go on to claim that they didn’t have any symptoms just a few days ago.”
If Stadler is right, it means that Australia and the rest of the world can look to take a less draconian approach – and that the virus will likely, like SARS before it, die out long before there is a vaccine.