A special type of immunity has been found in health care workers treating COVID-19-infected patients in the red zone, scientists from NHS Trust, University College London and Imperial College London, said. Their research is published in the journal Nature.

RIA Novosti reported.

The authors of the work followed more than 750 medical workers who were in constant contact with patients with coronavirus. As a result, over the entire study period, 58 people did not receive a single positive test for infection. They had one special feature in blood tests that the rest of the subjects lacked: a high concentration of the immune system T cells, which act as memory cells and are able to recognize specific infections when they occur in the body.

The researchers believe that these specific T lymphocytes stop SARS-CoV-2 by closing a cluster of viral proteins called a replication-transcription complex that helps the virus reproduce. As it turned out, these T cells were present in the blood samples collected before the pandemic, moreover, they could recognize the coronavirus.

As scientists assume, the lymphocytes they identified could appear in the body when infected with the coronavirus, which causes the common cold, but there is no direct evidence of this.