Emergency paramedics wearing a full COVID-19 coronavirus personal protective equipment transfer an empty gurney to an ambulance at the Greenacres Hospital in Port Elizabeth, on July 10, 2020. - Ambulances have to queue before patients suspected of having symptoms related to the COVID-19 coronavirus are triaged and admitted.
Dr Shakira Choonara, an independent public health practitioner, has said this would be another tool in our arsenal, needed to learn as much as possible about the virus. She explained that the new Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2 serology test could support the detection of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in patients who have been exposed to the virus which causes Covid-19.
After being infected with the virus, our bodies will begin to make antibodies to fight the virus and these usually first appear in the blood around 14 days after first infection and can then be measured using an antibody or serology test. “I believe that introducing antibody testing is a big step forward as it will assist epidemiologists in knowing the true scale of the infections and also which communities have been affected. We will also learn more about how immunity to the virus is built up and retained after infection. The big disadvantage has been that these tests have up till now not been validated and some of them were shown to be inaccurate.
“…the response is usually delayed, so this test can only tell us if someone has been infected at some point which led to the body mounting an immune response. It cannot tell us if the person is currently infected. Therefore we cannot use the antibody test to diagnose active disease, but we can use it to detect how many people in the community or population have been infected,” Mosam explained.
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