Catching a cold could have prevented some Brits from catching Covid

British people getting the common cold could have protected them from catching Covid-19 when the pandemic struck.

Researchers at Imperial College London said this previous exposure to colds would have seen many Brits carrying high levels of memory T-cells, the Telegraph reports.

Senior author of the study and director of the NIHR Respiratory Infections Health Protection Research Unit at Imperial, Prof Ajit Lalvani, , told The Telegraph that these T-cells were likely to be present in a large number of people.

He said: "It’s a good proportion of the population, a third in our study,” he said: “It explains the good outcomes or resistance to infection for some people."

He added: “It’s been a fundamental question since the start of the pandemic, why is there such a wide spectrum of outcomes in a naive population, some people in intensive care and dying and others not even getting infected?

“So it was postulated that exposure to common colds may leave memory T-cells that would protect people even though they’ve never seen Sars-CoV-2."

Details of the study, which involved 52 people who were living with someone who had recentlycaught Covid-19, were published in Nature Communications.

The research was undertaken in September 2020, which was before the vaccination programme kicked in and way before omicron.

Experts have stressed that nobody should assume they are protected from Covid-19 if they have recently had a cold.

T-cells are part of the immune system and some of them are able to kill cells which have been infected by, for example, a cold virus.

After the cold has gone, remaining T-cells act as a memory bank and are able to defend the body when they next encounter the virus.

Earlier studies had shown that some people had immune cells that could 'recognise' Covid-19, despite never being infected.