#superdodgers

The Boston Globe - A small group of ‘superdodgers’ insist they’ve never had COVID. Here’s why they may be wrong. By Sarah Rahal Updated June 3, 2026, 5:30 a.m. Last month, The Boston Globe asked readers who believe they’ve never caught the coronavirus to share their experiences. The response was overwhelming. More than 500 people wrote in, many offering to sign up for clinical trials, convinced their stories might help researchers uncover why some people appear to have evaded the pandemic. In fact, researchers are already working to answer that question. Their most definitive finding so far: NOVIDs are exceedingly rare. “There’s a difference between people who believe they’ve never had COVID and those who truly haven’t,” said Dr. Sabrina Assoumou, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center and a researcher at Boston University. Data suggest only about 2 to 3 percent of people have no COVID antibodies worldwide, meaning they may never have been infected, Assoumou said. Even that may be an overestimate, since most people who feel like outliers likely had asymptomatic or mild infections that went undetected. But the possibility that a tiny fraction truly escaped infection has intrigued researchers. They formed an international consortium of 250 scientists, known as the COVID Human Genetic Effort, who are hunting for an even smaller group: people with genetic variants that may make them resistant to the virus.

We’ve known about asymptomatic covid since the get go of the pandemic, because that’s how the spread was so diabolical. So it’s true there are probably many cases where people have no idea they had covid. All you have to do is look at the amount of people who just assume they have a really really really bad cold, or the flu, without even bothering to test. I hear that all the time from podcasters, pundits, and other content creators. We also know that there could be things that make people more or less likely to be resistant to other things, like HIV, for example. I remember decades ago being riveted by a PBS NOVA episode about Stephen Cohn. But of course there are also people such as myself who have never been sick with covid and never tested positive for covid. I even had an antibody test a month or two after a known exposure in March 2020, and that was negative. I’ve not even had an actual cold-like illness since January 2020. And even so, I couldn’t say for sure. In my case, avoiding covid is likely a mix of luck and because I actually take precautions. I say it’s a mix of luck because I do in fact likely get exposed from time to time, at dental or medical appointments, for example, though I request healthcare providers to mask when I’m having to unmask, and my dentist, who masked prior to the pandemic because he doesn’t want to breathe in tooth dust, canceled when he had cold symptoms. I do think there are probably more people avoiding covid, at least to some extent, than people realize. There’s been marketing research all along that has showed that behaviour patterns remained shifted even after the push to get back to normal for The Economy. The reason that it’s not so obvious is in my opinion a damning one; it’s because it’s largely groups that are already ignored and marginalized otherwise as well: the elderly & disabled.