The objective of many governments is to generalize these tests in order to determine who can break out of the confinement to which half of humanity is today subjected.
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PSeveral studies have been launched in recent days in the United States to test, in samples of the population, how many people have actually been infected with the new coronavirus and are potentially immune.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has started a study in the most active hot spots of the epidemic, according to the specialized website Statnews. This type of test, known as serology, looks for specific antibodies in a person’s blood, to see if they have already encountered the coronavirus, even without knowing it, as is common. When the immune system encounters a virus, it stores its memory in the form of antibodies, often for life.
The CDC director said that perhaps a quarter of those infected with the coronavirus had no symptoms.
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Separately, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford in California, told AFP that he collected blood samples from 2,500 volunteers in Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) on Saturday, chosen to be representative of the county’s population, as well as 500 of their children. A few drops of blood were taken by a quick prick on a finger.
The goal of many governments is to generalize these tests to determine who can break out of the confinement to which half of humanity is subjected today. But not all antibody tests are created equal and cannot tell if the person, while having encountered the virus, has enough antibodies to protect them from future infection.
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