How antibodies from your adaptive immune system beat COVID-19

While scientists and healthcare professionals are hard at work developing vaccines for the coronavirus, your body’s adaptive immune system is also hard at work fighting off COVID-19. I describe how specialized immune cells, called B Cells, are trained in the bone marrow to identify pathogens like the coronavirus mature and become activated when your body is exposed to the coronavirus for the first time. Once activated these B Cells are called Plasma Cells that rapidly grow to crank out as many antibodies as possible to help your body block the virus from infecting and new cells, as well as make the virus easily identifiable by other immune cells like macrophages that can quickly gobble it up and kill it.