Dozens of blood tests are rapidly coming on the market to identify people who've been exposed to the coronavirus by checking for antibodies. Here's what you need to know about the tests and their effectiveness 👇
Stanford medical student Thomas Koehnkz takes a blood sample from Alan Wessel of Mountain View, Calif., for a coronavirus antibody study.Ray Chavez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images
In many other diseases, people do have a period of immunity after they have been exposed to a microbe and recover from illness. But that has not been demonstrated yet with the coronavirus. VanderGaast says the test isn't available in her county now. But it is starting to take off nationally.in Austin, Texas. He got a supply of antibody tests made by a major Chinese manufacturer and says he has tested several hundred people in the last few days.
– A term that describes how good a test is at avoiding false positives. A test with 95% specificity has a 5% false-positive rate. Tests for the coronavirus range from 90% to 99% specificity. Higher is better.– A term that describes how good a test is at finding the antibody. A test with 95% sensitivity will find antibodies that are present in a blood sample 95% of the time. The remaining 5% of results would be false negatives.
In that instance, more than 90% of the positive results would be false positives, and falsely reassuring. .Lab giant Becton Dickinson says its coronavirus antibody test has a specificity of 91%. Emory University says its test has a specificity of 95%. Stanford University says its test demonstrated 100% specificity, at least in a preliminary study involving 100 samples.
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