I was tested three days ago for the antibodies for Covid-19.
I came up negative.
This is a good thing I tell myself, as I try to process and come to terms with, “That horrible cough and fatigue I had over two months ago” must have been just a bad cold. What it means from a scientific point of view is that I haven’t had an exposure that resulted in my getting an infection that would have prompted my immune system to mount an antibody response within the last two weeks.
So my daily exposure to Covid-19 at the hospital (as limited as it is compared to all the real front line nurses, doctors, and especially nurse’s aides) has not given me an infection.
So yay for PPE!
Yay also for having an office to which I can escape to after rounds, even though it smells like Clorox and has PPE bags hanging from the walls, it is an area to escape from the crushing presence of the virus. I feel for those in the ED and Covid units who have little escape.
As expected, one of my colleagues in the office has also tested negative and I expect the other two to test negative as well.
This does NOT mean that we can’t get it though, so the idea of have a “card or an app” that identifies a person who is negative as “safe” is silly.
It just means that I haven’t gotten an infection in the last 2 weeks. It doesn’t mean that I don’t currently have a sub-clinical (no symptoms) infection and I might be positive in two weeks, or even that I am not currently infectious. So there’s that.
And there’s the quandary.
Obviously, those of us who are negative are now in the “try not to get it” game. I can assure you that you don’t want to take the chance on getting it and being that lucky small percent that get asymptomatic infection.
If, on the other hand, you are positive and have antibodies, you have the option of getting a good quantitative (to see the levels of antibodies) test, and donating plasma to see if it helps, or not.
However, does having antibodies give you any immunity? Can you get it again? How long would this immunity (if it is a thing) last? Would it be partial (like making a bad infection less difficult) or total?
We don’t know.
Some viruses give a strong immunity and some don’t. I personally have had Rubella (German Measles), four times in my life until I started getting MMR vaccine (yeah there was a time that was not a thing – I’m old ok?) because the Rubella disease didn’t give me long lasting immunity.
Granted, if this virus gave no immunity (of any sort) it would be one of very few that didn’t, but the issue is, we just don’t know.
Testing Everyone
So, since we didn’t get ahead of this thing at the start (for whatever reason… lets not get into it), we have to play the cards we’re dealt .
The only way to know who is “safe” and who is “contagious” and more importantly, what is the prevalence of the virus is to test everyone repeatedly.
Without this, we won’t know what the true infection rate is, we won’t know what the true death rate is, we won’t know how the disease spreads, and we’ll stumble around just watching some people live and some people die like we did in the 1960’s (I was there, it sucked – routine male sterility with mumps, routine death and blindness from measles, paralysis from polio, etc). So yeah we test everyone, maybe on an every 6 month basis, but this should not in any way be used to restrict anyone from their rights, just as a tool to understand the disease and control its spread.
The early numbers we have (which stink because we haven’t tested enough) don’t show that 50% of the population that gets Covid gets antibodies but like I said, these numbers can change when we actually start testing people en masse.
Until a vaccine is done, everyone wears a mask and presumes the other person is infectious.
Kind of a rough way to live, not to mention a rough way to thrive, but unless you are willing to absorb three to five million deaths in the US alone (like they would have been ok with in the 50’s and 60’s because we didn’t have anything else) it is what we are going to have to do.
By the way, if your answer is that you’d be ok with it, you’ll be doing it at home by yourself, because we have seen that the medical system, such as it is, can barely keep up with the current level of dying patients.
Life, Health, and Policy. 