The UK may soon be getting tests for detecting COVID-19 antibodies:
The UK has ordered 3.5 million antibody tests designed to reveal whether people have been infected with the new coronavirus. The UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who today announced he himself has tested positive for the virus, has said these tests will be a “game changer”, but the reality is they might not have that much of an impact in the short term. …
Antibody tests, by contrast, detect the antibodies our bodies produce to kill the virus, which we keep producing even after the virus is eliminated. These tests can reveal who has been infected even after they have recovered. Handheld tests that require only a drop of blood can give results in 10 minutes, and can be mass produced quickly and cheaply. …
How accurate do the tests need to be? “It’s very difficult to say,” says Emily Adams at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK, who is helping assess the tests developed by Mologic, one of the companies supplying the UK. Part of that process will be working out what accuracy is required for different uses, says Adams. …
The antibody response to the coronavirus may be delayed compared with other infections. The tests can be used only 14 days or more after people develop symptoms, says Adams. [NewScientist]
My Arts Editor and I will be very interested in taking this test, if it ever makes its way to the United States, after the recent revelation – at least for us – that symptoms congruent with stomach flu have been associated with COVID-19, and, I’ll tell you, we each had one doozy of a dose of stomach flu, from roughly the last week of February to the end of the first week of March. Possibly the worst I’ve ever had.
It does cross my mind to wonder, given it’s been seen in a low percentage of cases, if it happened to be concurrent infections.
