🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
As authorities across the globe draft plan to reopen communities currently under lockdown, the conversation about a mass-distributed antibody test to determine an individual's coronavirus immunity has begun to take shape.
Various officials in the United States, like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, have advocated for the test's dissemination, arguing that it could provide valuable insight into which community members can safely return to work and which cannot. However, during a COVID-19 press briefing held over the weekend in Geneva, representatives from the World Health Organization (WHO) said the test's effectiveness remains unclear.
WHO's executive director of emergencies, Dr. Michael Ryan, said it is "unknown" if the antibody test is a reliable indicator of an immune system's longterm resistance to the virus.
In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it was developing a serology test to identify portions of the population that had been exposed to the coronavirus. The procedure would identify antibodies present in individuals who had contracted COVID-19 and then recovered. Though the test can provide data measuring those individuals' immune response to the virus, WHO's leading COVID-19 scientist, Dr. Maria Van Kekhove, noted that the data does not yet inform conclusions about future immunity.
During WHO's latest briefing, the public health agency disclosed the indeterminate results of an introductory investigation into the antibody test, conducted through a controlled study among recovered coronavirus patients in Shanghai. While a significant antibody response was detected in some patients, no response was detected in others, and Van Kekhove said verifying immunity in those patients with high responses would require further examination.
"Right now, we don't have a full picture of what immunity looks like. Until we do, we can't give a complete answer," she maintained. "That's something that we really need to better understand, is what does that antibody response look like in terms of immunity."
According to the latest statistics provided by Johns Hopkins University's coronavirus tracker Tuesday morning, more than 1.9 million people across 185 countries have tested positive for the new coronavirus since last December. Of them, close to 121,000 have died worldwide, while over 464,000 have recovered. Several reports of recovered COVID-19 patients contracting the disease for a second time have circulated recently, a situation Dr. Ryan acknowledged could be influenced by a number of factors.
"There are many reasons why we might see reactivation of infection either with the same infection or another infectious agent," he said, explaining that some patients might not clear the infection entirely even if it seems as though they've recovered, and others could develop a secondary infection in addition.
WHO is currently collaborating with a cohort of scientists, physicians and manufacturers to accelerate the availability of an approved COVID-19 vaccine, the organization announced in a statement released Monday.
