Over the course of the pandemic, my daughter has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19, at least four times. Mostly at school. Once at a party. Every time, somehow, she seems to have escaped an infection.
So how has Rosy done it? How has she seemingly pulled this rabbit from the hat or, in this case, pulled the coronavirus from her nose?
Over the past year, several studies have offered a tantalizing hint: Some people, even before being vaccinated, are really good at clearing the coronavirus from their respiratory tract and do it so quickly that the virus never reaches detectable levels. And the immune system accomplishes this coup with two key tools: immune cells originally made to fight another coronavirus — four key ones are out there — and an arm of the immune system that gets little attention in the media but is doing a huge amount of work to protect us all from SARS-CoV-2.
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SARS-CoV-2 is crafty. It has figured out how to sneak inside the cells of the respiratory tract quite easily. But once inside, the cells have their own trick up their sleeve.
