Could an antibody test help us keep society functioning over the next few months?

[andrewducker]

Researchers have developed a test for COVID 19 antibodies. Which means we have a method for telling who has had the virus, and is now immune to it.

Those people are _safe_. They can't catch the disease any more, which means they can't spread it (excepting on their clothes, I assume, which is probably reasonably low-risk).

That means that they're the best people to put on the front line. Get them on the tills at supermarkets, driving the food trucks, and opening the schools up (albeit only for children who have also got the antibodies).

Basically, we can start dividing the world into those who are safe and those who aren't - and the safe people can be a lot of use to those of us who are still waiting to catch it. Particularly the people who are at-risk.

I wonder how fast this could be scaled up.

Note: I am completely sure that this has drawbacks. If nothing else the tests will take ages to make available in volume. And it relies on much much more testing, (although we're going to end up doing a ton of testing for either the infection or the immunity, or both).
And it does rely on the immunity lasting a while. I'm hoping it will mostly last the two years that SARS did. If it lasts only a few months then we're in an awful lot of trouble.

Comments

[jjhunter]

Larry Brilliant has the best take on this I've seen so far: The doctor who helped defeat smallpox explains what’s coming

The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we're only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we're not testing enough, and we're just blind to it, then we're in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.

And instead of saying "No, you can't visit anybody in nursing home," we have a group of people who are certified that they work with elderly and vulnerable people, and nurses who can go back into the hospitals and dentists who can open your mouth and look in your mouth and not be giving you the virus. When those three things happen, that's when normalcy will return.

[andrewducker]

Thank you that's excellent.

[jjhunter]

My pleasure. I always get excited when I find another scientist who can communicate to laymen well.

[dewline]

Less rare than we fear, less common than we hope, those seem to be.

Hmm

[lsanderson]

I think the dear doctor may be working too hard. I agree with them until they get to point three, and then logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. Children, not teachers would be the main disease vector. The whole wristband or card thing seems right out of a concentration camp, and whacked to boot. If recovery conveys immunity, those people would be great back at the hospitals, dentists, and elder care, but I'm uncertain that that's certain yet. Having them as teachers is putting a very small cork into a giant hole.

[wolflady26]

Wait, I still couldn't send my kid back to school. I'm less worried about the one teacher than the 300 other kids with parents who need to get to work and will send them, even if they're only "mildly" sick. Not unless all the other kids had concert wristbands, too. And then I guess it wouldn't matter, because my kid would have had to have had one to get to school to begin with.