Is the delta variant more dangerous for young people?
COVID-19 science changes fast, but COVID Help Desk is here to… uh, help. This week, we answer readers’ questions about the delta variant, convalescent plasma, and whether vaccinated moms pass immunity to their baby.
Q: Is the delta variant more dangerous for young people?
A: There’s a lot that scientists still don’t know about delta, but it’s safe to say that delta more contagious for everyone, young and old.
Anecdotally, hospitals in the Texas Medical Center report that they’re now seeing more young patients with severe COVID-19 cases. “The average age in our ICUs used to be in the 60s,” said Bill McKeon, CEO of the Texas Medical Center. “Now it’s in the 30s.”
Lots of people believe that’s because older people are more likely to be vaccinated — and even if vaccinated people become infected, they don’t get as sick.
More than 90 percent of the people hospitalized for COVID aren’t vaccinated, McKeon said. People who aren’t vaccinated yet, he added, “are playing with their lives.”
Q: Early in the pandemic, people who’d recovered from COVID-19 were donating plasma for people who were very sick with COVID, so their antibodies could help fight off the disease. I never hear anything about convalescent plasma treatments these days. Why not?
A: It’s been replaced by newer monoclonal antibody treatments, which are more effective.
Convalescent plasma worked like this: A person who’d recently recovered from COVID-19 would donate enough plasma to treat two or three sick people. But that plasma contained all the antibodies in the donor’s blood; and
sometimes there weren’t a lot of COVID-fighting antibodies in it.
Monoclonal antibodies are grown in a lab, but otherwise, they’re exactly like COVID-neutralizing antibodies made in the human body. The difference, says Texas A&M virologist Ben Neuman, “is just that they’re concentrated. They’re antibodies that target one thing. It’s like buying a bag of M&Ms that has only green M&Ms — none of those other trash colors.”
Different COVID-fighting monoclonal antibodies can be combined into “cocktails.” That’s what President Donald Trump received when he had COVID.
Q: I was vaccinated before I got pregnant. Will my baby have immunity?
Multiple studies have shown that mothers can pass on antibodies to their unborn children, said Andrea Edlow, a Harvard Univeristy biologist and specialist in maternal fetal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
In March, Edlow and other researchers published research that found women who were vaccinated while pregnant passed antibodies to the placenta, as well as through breastfeeding. Her team also noted “significantly higher” levels of immunity among babies whose mothers were vaccinated than those who became immune through natural infection.
They’ve since found women who received the vaccine and then became pregnant also passed along antibodies, though protection varied based on the amount of time between vaccination and pregnancy.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pregnant women are more likely to become severely ill and require hospitalization, intensive care or ventilation after contracting COVID.