Children’s exposure to the common cold can give them cross-immunity against the COVID-19 virus, a new study by European scientists suggests.
Since the pandemic, there have been many hypotheses to explain the well-documented phenomenon that young children are much less likely than adults to be harmed by COVID-19 infection. One of them proposes that the common cold, which most children get exposed to at least six times a year, generates memory T-cells that can cross-react and kill cells infected with COVID.
To test the hypothesis, an international team of scientists analyzed 48 blood samples collected before the pandemic from children between 2 and 6 years old. They also examined 65 samples from unvaccinated and COVID-negative adults, as well as 58 samples from people who had recently recovered from COVID….