CDC begins antibody testing

The CDC has begun conducting blood tests that will find individuals who caught coronavirus but did not develop symptoms.

The antibody testing will first focus on three groups.

First, the testing will take place in hotspot regions and then they will introduce the testing to other less-impacted areas.

They also will focus on certain types of individuals like healthcare workers. 

The tests, called serology tests, work by detecting antibodies in the blood that the immune system makes in response to the virus.

The thinking is that if you have developed these antibodies (the long term type), that you will be immune or at very low risk of getting very sick from this virus in the future.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci stated, “if this virus acts like every other virus that we know, once you get infected, get better, clear the virus, then you’ll have immunity that will protect you against re-infection.”

Considering that we know that a high percentage of people with the virus are asymptomatic, the results of these tests could be pretty surprising — the number of individuals with this virus could be could be substantially higher than we currently think. 

The great thing about this test is that if they can prove immunity to the virus, then people can start getting back to work or start traveling without worrying about contracting the disease. Other countries are even proposing issuing health certificates based on these tests that allow people back into society — so called immunity passports.

These tests should also help us better understand how and when this virus started to spread, which can lead to better testing and tracing procedures in the future.

A lot of experts believe that if there is a second wave of coronavirus patients, it will be insignificant compared to the first wave because our testing and tracing procedures should be on point by then — not to mention treatments, etc.

There are also a lot of people who believe that this virus has been in our country for longer than we initially thought, perhaps since December.

I know a couple of people who had symptoms similar to the coronavirus and when they got tested their results came back inconclusive like “flu of unknown origin.”

So it will be interesting to see what the testing shows.

While this is going on, different vaccines are in the early stages of testing. One has already shown to spike the antibody levels in mice (a good sign) and will soon likely move to human trials.

H/T: NYT