I learned this week that many blood donation and plasma centers [1][2] are doing Coronavirus antibody tests for anyone* that donates right now.
I've heard a lot of people in my social / online circles comment how they wish they knew whether or not they had antibodies. Seems like a great way to find out.
[1] https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/dlp/covid-19-anti...
[2] https://www.lifeservebloodcenter.org/donate/recovered-covid-...
* Probably not literally anyone, but it sounds like they are giving them out pretty freely.
What people need to realize is that the important questions are not whether you've got antibodies but:
1 - whether you'll sick when you're exposed to the virus again
2 - how sick you'll get the next time around
No one knows the answers to these questions yet, and we also don't know how antibodies bear on the answers to these questions.
It is possible that even with antibodies you'll still get sick if you're exposed to the virus (as we know is the case for some other diseases), and even if antibodies play some role in how sick you'll get it's possible that (again, as is the case with some diseases) repeated exposure to the virus will cause even greater illness than the first time around.
People shouldn't be assuming that having antibodies means they're immune.. we just don't know enough yet to say whether that's true or not.
Even if it is true, there might be a certain level of antibodies that are required to have a certain level of immunity, and we don't know yet what level of antibodies are necessary, nor the kind of antibodies necessary,
Finally, even if antibodies do grant immunity, we don't know how long that immunity would last, nor if such immunity varies from person to person for some not yet known reason.
1. While you don’t get “really” sick again, you do “feel it” when re-exposed. Specifically I noticed diarrhea and a being a bit “off” on two separate instances where I believe I was Re-exposed.
2. I am 90% certain that even with immunity you remain a carrier when Re-exposed. I don’t know how much of a carrier, but just my strong suspicion (and why I have been extra careful when I have felt “off”)
Would love more medical data to back my hypothesis/observations/thoughts, but thought I would mention it.
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/07/mo...
[2] https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1278400526716211200?s=1...
- https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/ne...
- https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-19-antibodies-fade-month...
Also, anecdotally, a friend donated blood at the Red Cross and found he had covid antibodies. He had not been sick and has had no symptoms.
Today is literally the first day that I'm free from quarantine. Not because I got my test results back, but because the latency in testing has gotten so drawn out that even if that test eventually comes back positive, I already meet the CDC guidelines for ending quarantine. That test was completely useless for me and only serves to add some data to the statistics around the pandemic. Right now, if you want to get tested and you're not a high priority case (i.e. hospitalized), at least in my area, you can't even do that for all practical purposes. It would be arguably better if they just randomly tested only 50% and had a more reasonable backlog than testing 100% with a backlog so long that all but the high priority tests are useless by the time the results are available.
We've had literally months of time to ramp up testing nationwide. This pandemic is far from over and it's already killed 145,000 Americans. This is inexcusable incompetence by the legislative and executive branch.
There are only few locations that actually run the assays the logistics of getting the sample to a location is significant. Not to mention regent and other resource shortages mean some locations are off and can’t process anyone . Your sample gets moved somewhere else
Also testing is many times done like binary searches. Some 96 samples are combined and tested , if it is are negative no further tests required , if they come positive breakdown and so on . While even in the worst case you may will not need 96 separate tests, the steps are sequential, tests will take more time if more people on average become positive.
https://www.emirates.com/media-centre/emirates-becomes-first...
During the last SARS outbreak, this sort of thing was proposed: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2011/AN/c1an1...
... to do 3 minute tests. I assume grant funding dried up, since who could guess that after 2 outbreaks that we'd have a 3rd?
edited to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Transcription_Loop-med...
Yes, that's what I've read. Any US research scientists still working on SARS-1 after 2003 were told "you're on your own."
Kudos to Canada for being as diligent as Taiwan in attacking COVID-19 - they remember it wiping out Toronto hospital staff in 2003. Check out the Youtube CBC channel for their impressive nation-wide mobilization.
Makes you wonder wtf Chinese virology labs were doing for 20 years with coronavirus if they weren't working on a cure, doesn't it? (There's 40 labs total across China.)
Like most things in a command economy, they worked on whatever was a political priority.
I'd hazard to guess it wasn't a priority in the intervening years for the same reason there was little free market incentive to address it: yes, it's bad when it happens, but it doesn't happen that often.
Ergo, they were probably just as starved of resources.
The preexisting US effort was mostly funded through DARPA for the same reasons. https://www.darpa.mil/our-research (e.g. ADEPT, P3, Prometheus, PREPARE)
https://youtu.be/kDj4Zyq3yOA (Feel free to skip to around 6:35).
Preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20136309v...
Update: the colorado.edu article also links to this preprint when it discusses the "separate computer modelling study".
Medcram: “Coronavirus Pandemic Update 98: At Home COVID-19 Testing - A Possible Breakthrough”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Sv_pS8MgQ
Also, regarding the Ct value, from:
“Interpreting the COVID-19 Test Results: a Guide for Physiatrists”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7268832/
In PCR tests “the diagnosis is made based on the threshold cycle (Ct) value. Ct is defined as the cycle number when the sample fluorescence exceeds a chosen threshold above the calculated background fluorescence.5 In other words, the lower the Ct value of a specific gene, the more the gene exists in the sample. However, the problem with a Ct-based diagnosis is that there is no absolute or constant Ct cut-off value, and Ct cut-off values are different for each diagnostic reagent even for the same gene.”
That, sadly, is nonsense unless you have thousands of technicians available to process the tests. What we have here is a classic latency vs throughput problem. 45 minutes to an answer is a lot better than 24-48 hours which is about the best achievable with the PCR tests. But even if only a third of the 45 minutes is a tech messing with "pipettes, a heating source and an enzyme mixture" and the rest is waiting for reactions at best one tech could do perhaps 30 a day. On the other hand the "fancy equipment" in PCR labs can do thousands of such tests in one go (UW Virology here in Seattle is doing over 5000/day[1]).
They just arn't very similar beasts, if you had to draw an analogy about the difficulty of the problem it would be that we don't yet have a cure for the common cold (which is a corona virus.)
Also
>One researcher spiked 30 out of 60 saliva samples with inactivated SARS-CoV-2 in the lab. Then they shuffled the samples and gave them to another scientist to test with the RT-LAMP technology.
I wonder if that required a BSL-3 facility or not. Generally you can do medical work on this virus with any sort of facility or laboratory you have on hand but you're only allowed to do science involving the virus if you have a special laboratory with negative pressure and special failsafes and so on.
https://www.news.com.au/national/saliva-test-with-87-per-cen...
https://hamodia.com/2020/06/30/israeli-company-introduces-co...
[0]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20067835v...
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.0208...
They are doing some amazing work with this and SickStick.
