Over 98% of Ho Chi Minh City residents have COVID-19 antibodies: survey
Monday, November 28, 2022, 16:50 GMT+7
A survey on COVID-19 herd immunity conducted among 839 random people in Ho Chi Minh City recently found more than 98 percent carry antibodies against the coronavirus.
The survey was carried out by the city’s Center for Disease Control in collaboration with the Ho Chi Minh City Hospital for Tropical Diseases and Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU) in September, Tang Chi Thuong, director of the municipal Department of Health, said on Monday.
The participants were aged from 12 to 70 and were divided into nine age groups.
Researchers collected serum randomly from them to measure anti-SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N)-protein and anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike (S)-protein antibodies.
The result showed that 88.2 percent of the samples have N-protein antibodies, which are produced only after a person gets infected with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 or a person receives the Chinese inactivated vaccine Sinopharm.
However, only a few people in Ho Chi Minh City received this vaccine and no one under 18 got it.
Some 98.7 percent have S-protein antibodies, which are produced either by vaccination or infection.
Only 1.3 percent do not have S-protein antibodies.
But this does not mean that they are not protected against the novel coronavirus, because this survey did not assess the cellular immune response.
The research team concluded that by September this year, 88 percent of people in Ho Chi Minh, which has a population of nine million, had contracted COVID-19.
The health department anticipated that the Omicron variant is the main factor for herd immunity in the city since when students returned to school in March, the fast-spreading, more contagious variant was emerging in the city.
The volume of S-protein antibodies is the lowest in the group under 12, which matches the vaccination rate, said Thuong.
It is expected that the research team will continue to collect more samples for the survey next month.
From this survey, the department continues to call on every family in the city to have their members from five years old get vaccinated.
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