Are we immune?

What proportion of the population have already been infected with COVID-19? How long does immunity last? A team of researchers at University Hospital Zurich is seeking answers to these questions. Their findings will help combat the pandemic even more systematically.

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It started like a harmless cold. But when a few days later 70-year-old Stefan Hungerbühler* was in bed with a high fever, it emerged that he had caught the coronavirus. That was in September 2020. Fortunately he made a full recovery. Recently he was tested for antibodies, along with his wife Ursula, who had had no symptoms. The test revealed that both of them had antibodies against the coronavirus in their blood.

But how much protection does this give them from contracting the disease again? Will this protection last until the next time they can get a vaccination? So far nobody has been able to say for sure. To curb the pandemic effectively it would be good to know what percentage of the population has already gone through the infection and how immunity develops over time, including after vaccination.

This is where “Immunity against Coronavirus” comes in, a research project run by the team around Professor Adriano Aguzzi at the Institute of Neuropathology at University Hospital Zurich. This project is being funded by three donations to the USZ Foundation. The researchers around Adriano Aguzzi are analyzing blood samples from around 200,000 people in the Greater Zurich Area for antibodies. They’re able to use samples from USZ and the Swiss Red Cross’s blood donation service – naturally with the consent of the patients and blood donors affected.

For the project the team has developed a novel, highly sensitive automated antibody test that works on the basis of artificial intelligence. This enables the researchers to rapidly get more comprehensive and precise results than similar projects.

Their work will help paint a representative picture of the immunity of the population in the Greater Zurich Area and reliably assess the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic. This knowledge will help when it comes to taking the right measures to safeguard the public and determining how vaccination strategy develops – so that people like Stefan and Ursula Hungerbühler know whether they’re protected from the virus.

*anonymized/symbolic image

100% financed

NOMIS Foundation

Baugarten Foundation

Georg und Bertha Schwyzer-Winiker Foundation