STEERING CLEAR — Is ‘Novid’ a thing? Have some people really gone through three-and-a-half years of Covid and still never gotten the disease through some combination of caution and luck? And if a slice of the public really has avoided the virus — even amid the current Covid uptick that has led to slight rise in hospitalizations — can scientists learn from them? The answer is yes and yes — with the usual Covid caveats is that a lot is still unknown. There probably are a relatively small number of people who really haven’t gotten it — although many if not most of those who think they were untouched probably had very mild or asymptomatic cases. Maybe we should call them LowVids. And yes, scientists working on the next generation of treatments and vaccines can in fact learn from these individuals. Some recent genetic findings published in Nature have pointed them in at least one potentially fruitful direction. Studies of blood samples showed in 2022 that about 60 percent of the U.S. public had been infected. More recent studies ran quite a bit higher, in the high 80s or into the 90s. Blood studies have limitations though — they aren’t representative of the population as a whole, and because Covid immunity — both from prior infection and vaccination — declines over time, it’s possible that someone who had Covid early on wouldn’t have signs of it in their blood one, two or three years later. “No one knows for sure (how many remained uninfected). It could be as low as four or five percent. It could be, you know, nine or 10 percent. But it probably isn’t 15 percent,” said Eric Topol, a physician-scientist at Scripps Research and the author of the Ground Truths newsletter that has helped explain Covid to the public. Katelyn Jetelina, in her popular Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter, recently cited some research in the U.K that suggested that on average, people get it twice a year. But many infections are so mild that people don’t realize it’s Covid, or they are asymptomatic, meaning their bodies fought infection off so well that they never got even a teeny bit sick. At home rapid Covid tests don’t pick up every infection immediately, which is why the CDC recommends testing two or three times. Why some people don’t get sick — even if members of their household have been diagnosed with Covid — is probably “a mixture of luck and maybe some genetics and maybe a lot about vaccination” plus in some cases some immunity from a prior infection, whether confirmed by a test or not, said Jacek Skarbinski, a physician and scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. Research led by Jill Hollenbach at UCSF recently published in Nature examined 30,000 individuals — and found only 1,400 hadn’t fallen ill from Covid. Importantly, they identified a gene that means people are more likely to remain asymptomatic — twice as likely with one copy of the gene, a whopping eight times as likely with two copies. (People aren’t born with the gene; it's acquired from prior exposure to a less dangerous strain of coronavirus that predates the pandemic.) That discovery does open important new research pathways, particularly for therapeutics. “It’s a long way to understand how this finding will lead to better therapies, prevention or treatment. But it’s important,” Topol told Nightly. “It is giving us a hint” about how to develop a treatment to block infection. And as the recent uptick of cases reminds us, “Covid is still among us,” he said, even if most people have some degree of protection right now. Skarbinski, who was interviewed earlier this summer, before cases began to rise again this month, said there’s still a ton to tease out, including about how people behave to protect themselves, how they socialize, whether they keep up to date on vaccinations. Remember, he said, the virus loves a good party. “Covid loves big mixings, gatherings for people from all over, from different parts of the country.” That’s how it spread before. And that’s probably part of how it’s now spreading again, even though we collectively have enough protection for now to probably ward off a lot of serious illness — to stay Low-Vid until science can someday make us NoVid. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author on Twitter at @JoanneKenen.
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