People queuing for the vaccination in Košice. (source: TASR)
More than half of the population unvaccinated against Covid do not have antibodies.
This stems from research conducted in several localities of Slovakia with 3,789 participants. The study was carried out under the auspices of the Health Ministry; samples were collected by the Medical Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava and Pavel Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, diagnosed by the Biomedical Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.
“The level of antibodies was about 50 percent when the individual districts were experiencing the peak of the Delta wave,” said mathematician Richard Kollár. “This means that the Delta wave reached only half of the unvaccinated population.”
This is the first such study in Slovakia. The study involved participants who were ill in the winter and spring of 2021 when the Alpha variant was dominant in Slovakia, as well as in autumn of 2021 when Delta dominated.
The study also showed that 82 percent of those who did not recover from Covid had a negative antibodies test.
Kollár pointed that antibody levels drop quite fast and low levels of antibodies will not be sufficient against the upcoming Omicron variant.
Group of people with no protection against Covid
Scientists collected samples in November and December in the cities of Bratislava and Košice and the districts of Čadca, Považská Bystrica, Komárno, Kežmarok and Lučenec. Participants were 12 and older and their participation was voluntary. Antibodies were evaluated from drops of blood. They also collected data from those who had recovered from the disease.
Those who had recovered from the disease with a symptomatic course (44 percent) had a medium-high level of antibodies, said the director of the Institute for Health Analyses Matej Mišík.
“There is a great number of people who do not have any protection against Covid, nor from vaccination or recovery from the disease,” he said. One-third of people who have recovered from the asymptomatic disease have no antibodies at all.
The scientific director of the Biomedical Research Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Juraj Kopáček, said that the presence of antibodies does not necessarily mean one is protected against the disease.
“Antibodies are only one part of one's immunity; they drop over time,” he said.
When counted together, there are about a million people in Slovakia who do not have antibodies either from recovery or vaccination, said Mišík, as quoted by the Denník N daily.
The result was, according to him, better in countries where similar studies have been conducted. The UK measures antibodies either from vaccination or recovery in 95 percent of inhabitants. Countries like Finland, Sweden and Estonia measure the antibodies of 75 to 87 percent of the population.
