It's been quite awhile since I have posted on this blog, but I have been meaning to get back to it for quite some time. As we all know, the end of last school year did not exactly go as expected, and our last marking period was completely virtual, which worked ok for some people and not so well at all for others. The summer was a time of great uncertainty for me as I looked ahead to the upcoming school year. At the beginning of the summer, we had no idea how the year would start. As plans were made to go back full time, I was still unsure how things would go. My emotions and concerns were a bit overwhelming, and I just didn't feel ready to blog about them yet.
Well, we (myself, my fellow educators and support staff, and our students) have been back in school- mostly in person- for a month at this point. We are in week 5. It has been very challenging, although not for the reasons I anticipated. The students have been wonderful. Most are following the rules, wearing the masks, abiding by the new procedures and guidelines with very few complaints. So far, our school has not had to close at all because of COVID-19 cases. Our biggest challenge has been the job of teaching itself. This year, for the first time, we have taken on the role of in-person and distance teaching, as our district has given our students the option of coming back to school in-person, or through distance learning online. The goal is to keep our distance learning students on track daily with our in-person students. The amount of time it takes to prepare for this is staggering. Because I have been so busy just trying to keep up from day to day, I haven't really had much of a chance to think about my blog. So that is where we are at this point. I have many more thoughts about everything, but for now, I'll just leave it at that!
One of my main goals this year is to really help my students to understand what science is and how to become better scientific thinkers. I want to show them how important it is to really, truly understand science and how much it applies to our lives. Because I teach biology, we have spent a good deal of time here at the beginning of the year talking about COVID-19 and the science of the virus, how our bodies respond to it, the race for a safe and effective vaccine, and how our immune systems work to fight infections. While looking for articles and information to discuss, I came across a very interesting one about the differences in how adults and children respond to COVID-19. Most of us have probably heard that children tend to have less severe responses to the coronavirus, and one area of research has been to figure out how to explain this. The article I read discusses the interesting idea that children often do better because they have a stronger innate immune response than adults. Our innate immune response is basically our first immune response- it is not specific to particular antigens and begins working as soon as antigens are discovered in our bodies. Our adaptive immune response is triggered by our innate response, and it takes longer to get going. This is the part of our immune system that creates the antigen-specific response that hopefully will ultimately conquer the germs, as well as our immune memory of particular antigens that will hopefully provide us with immunity in the future.
A study was done on pediatric and adult COVID-19 patients at two different hospitals. The pediatric patients fared much better in terms of outcomes. Blood samples were taken from the patients in the study to look for antibodies and other proteins that would be a part of their immune responses. It turns out that children had much higher levels of proteins called cytokines that are associated with the innate immune response than adults. Surprisingly, adult patients who died or who required ventilators had very high levels of neutralizing antibodies, which indicate a strong adaptive immune response- their levels of these antibodies were higher than adult patients who recovered, and significantly higher than pediatric patients. According to Kevan C. Herold, MD, one of the authors of the study, this would seem to indicate an "over-vigorous adaptive immune response," which could lead to inflammation and respiratory distress.
The end of this article was particularly interesting to me, because the implications of this research for treatment and prevention of COVID-19 were discussed. The study showed that those who had the best outcomes- children- had a robust innate immune response. Those who had the worst outcomes had a strong adaptive immune response. Patients with poor outcomes might do better if their innate immune response was boosted, rather than their adaptive immune response. Using plasma from COVID patients has been a much-talked about treatment option, but this study seems to suggest that it would not be effective as it is supplies patients with neutralizing antibodies, which they already seem to have in abundance. Additionally, most of our current vaccine candidates, on which we have pinned so much hope, also work to strengthen neutralizing antibody levels. The last sentence of the article is a quote from study author Betsy Herold, MD, "We may want to consider assessing vaccines that promote immunity in other ways, such as by bolstering the innate immune response."
Wow!
Article Link: Comparing COVID-19 Immune Responses Uncovers Key Differences between Adults and Children
