Antibody Tests Won't Get Us Back to Normal - The Atlantic - 0 views
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antibody tests don’t give a snapshot of the present. It can take two weeks for a patient to develop a detectable amount of antibodies in their blood, so antibody surveys are necessarily backward-looking. But when public-health officials are deciding whether schools or businesses are safe to reopen, the key piece of information is the number of people currently infected. “I want to know what is happening now,” Osterholm said, “and antibody testing will not get that to you.”
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The key strategies for stopping the disease are still the same ones experts have been promoting from the beginning: testing, contact tracing, isolating for those who test positive for COVID-19, and social distancing for everyone else. “There’s going to have to be some level of new normal for a while,”
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Current antibody surveys are revealing, furthermore, that immunity to COVID-19 can vary widely from location to location
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The pandemic may be global but, as Yonatan Grad, an immunologist at Harvard University, told me, “it is made up of hyperlocal epidemics that are differentially impacting communities.” If neighboring cities, states, or countries are at very different points in their outbreak trajectory, it could create difficult questions about when and how to reopen. The places that have best succeeded in stopping COVID-19 will be the ones most vulnerable to infections in the future. Singapore, for example, succeeded in containing the virus early on, only to see a huge surge of cases in March and April. “At some point,” Grad said, “we’re going to need to think about How do we all get to the same place?”