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Despite seven waves, some Swiss have never had Covid. As a further rise in infections looms in the fall and winter, understanding why some people appear to be protected will shed light on the mechanism of virus infection.
We are not all equal in the face of Covid: some are at risk, others are protected. How does this protection work? How can we recognize it? Two questions have guided the work of many research groups since the beginning of the epidemic.
Why is reasonable. The history of infectious diseases shows that the idea is possible. Jacques Fellay, Director of the Human Genome Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at EPFL, explains: “There are amazing examples of resistance … We think of the CCR5 gene variant that protects against HIV infection, FUT2 against noroviruses, the pathogens responsible for violent diarrhea, or those that confer resistance to malaria.”
So it’s also possible that given human diversity, some are naturally armed against Covid-19, and resistant to infection with Sars-CoV-2. This is the hypothesis of researchers in covid human genetic effortan international research consortium, aims to identify genetic characteristics that modulate the response to Sars-CoV-2 and thus those that confer protection.
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