Everyone seems to agree that having Antibody tests available are the key to knowing whether a person had been exposed to the Corona Virus and has recovered
Unfortunately, despite FDA ‘approval’ there currently appears to be NO RELIABLE test available. Most of the 1,000+ different tests come from China and reportedly have a 20-30% accuracy level. According to most articles I found a few minutes ago - indicate that there is NOTHING on the market now that is reliable enough to be useful. Reliable antibody tests are likely months away and will require extensive review before they can be trusted.
This is half true. Antibody tests do work reliably however that doesn't mean it's a reliable test. The problem is that antibodies are often not present in sufficient quantities during the early days of infections so they often fail to diagnose individuals with a particular infection. And after the infection is over the body may not keep those antibodies around forever either. So there's a sweet spot between recovery and whenever the antibodies go away when the tests can recognize them.
The important takeaway though in the early antibody testing that has been done to date is that far more people have been exposed to Covid-19 that previously thought dropping the mortality estimates to anywhere from 0.2 all the way down to 0.02% (which is significantly lower than the flu). Combine that with the fact that antibody tests arn't always reliable at picking this up either the mortality rates could be lower still.
Obviously this is all still early on and it's too early to make judgment calls, but early data would seem to suggest that the world economy was stopped, and millions of people are without work because of something that has around a 0.1% mortality rate... I agree with this site. It's time to open the states.
Thanks ... I should have been clearer that some of the new antibody tests are proving to be unreliable (with accuracy rates as low as 20-30%). The traditional lab blood test have much greater reliability.
My concern is that a some leaders are also saying that businesses should not open and public areas should not be accessible until AFTER widely available and highly-accurate tests that are available for mass testing. I think this level of availability and accuracy will take many many months. This would IMHO force many businesses to fail and the economy collapse ... exactly what some on the wacko side of the debate would love to see.
I think you may have a mashup of news. Unless there's more stuff that I'm not aware of yet, the 20-30% accuracy rates are specifically referring to the testing kits produced by Bioeasy in China (which had around a 70% failure rate). There's a pretty big difference between an antigen and an antibody test however and the antigen tests that China sent to some of the EU countries did not even meet Chinese standards and couldn't be distributed within China. Ironically though because many countries in EU had such lax requirements these tests could be sent over there (and the results were about what you'd expect accuracy wise).
But the key difference is that an Antigen test is used to determine if a person currently has Covid-19 (possibly before symptoms even manifest). The Antibody tests only work after the fact and can be used during a specific window of time to see if a previously undiagnosed person had recovered from a particular disease. These tests are NOT accurate for diagnosis (and no doctors should be attempting to use them in this way) but they can give us an indication as to how many people had the virus and never needed treatment. And it's these tests and their information that is leading us to discover that the death rate is actually closer to 0.2% to as low as 0.02% (making this potentially much more tame than the yearly flu)
But yes. I agree with you. We should continue making tests available to people just to verify the numbers that are coming in, but as long as it appears that this virus is less deadly than the flu. Don't wait. Start opening things now. Forcing the entire country to wait for a test that could take many many months to distribute would do nothing useful and would only serve to crush the economy beyond repair.
I hope nobody agrees with mandatory vaccines.
The first post says there are no reliable anti-body tests? The second posts states that early anti-body testing shows that there is a much larger infection rate than previously thought? So what is it? Are the tests reliable or not? The studies I read about were done by medical experts using serology testing to get the increased infection rates.
Antibody tests are like those little stamps that amusement parks put on your hand. If you have one it means that you went to that park and that part of it is reliable. However what if someone checks your hand while you're in the park but standing in line waiting to get in? Well you're at the park but it's too soon to have the stamp. And what happens if someone check your hand the next year? Well it would have long since washed off.
The test itself is accurate. If the body has the antibody/"stamp" you can find it reliably. If they have that "stamp" you can be 100% sure that they have had the virus. And when testing so close to the time of the outbreak you can be sure that people who got it haven't lost their antibodies yet.
However, where the test falls short is if you test someone who was recently infected and has not yet manifested symptoms. It's not designed for that. And it's possible that a person tested could test positive 2 weeks later as they are currently in the carrier stage. But this point of antibody testing isn't to see who is currently sick, it's to see who has recovered (at that it does with high accuracy).
I am not a doctor ... so don't have any unique insight. Well respected laboratories supporting hospitals and doctors (e.g., Quest Diagnostics here in FL) do provide access to 'high throughput LAB tests' which are 95+% reliable. There are, however, LOTS of new 'home tests' and others entering the market that I would not trust at all.
That's probably good advice as many of the new tests are "self certified" (since the FDA can't possibly approve everything in a timely manner). Which means they could be garbage tests. On the flip side though sometimes those test are highly accurate and the official tests can be terrible. Consider that initially the CDC's tests would flag a person as having corona virus if there was ANY water in the sample at all leading to some embarrassing accuracy problems and delaying a lot of the early testing.
So overall I'd trust the official tests more, but it's always a good idea to research things yourself a bit too no organization is exempt from making mistakes from time to time.