COVID-19 antibody tests raise as many questions as they answer

Abstract

n January, we didn’t know much about the novel coronavirus that would eventually be called SARS-CoV-2 We had just determined its genetic sequence We were still learning about the vast array of symptoms it could cause And we didn’t yet know how widespread, and how deadly, the disease COVID-19 would become That same January, after several days at a large international biotech conference in San Francisco, shaking hands, sharing elevators, and sitting across from people in tiny hotel rooms, I got sick My head hurt I was exhausted I toggled between allergy meds, work, and long naps And then, after about a week, I got better A couple of months later, while reporting on less conventional symptoms of COVID-19, I was struck by the more common ones, like headache and fatigue Thinking back to my illness in January with the hindsight that soon after I left, the Bay Area became an early epicenter for COVID-19 in the US, I wondered: Could I have had a mild case of this disease? To find out, I started to look for an antibody test, a blood test to detect the immune signal that would tell me whether at some point in the past, I had been infected with SARS-CoV-2