There has been a lot of talk about serological tests lately, which is a fancy way for describing testing people’s blood for COVID-19 antibodies, to see if they previously had the virus, and may now be immune to it. Along with the discussions have come the idea of “immunity passports”. The idea behind immunity passports is, if a person has already had COVID-19, they should now be immune to it, and therefore safe to return to work, etc.
Unfortunately the reality is not quite so simple, for a number of reasons. I will go over some of the main ones here:
- We don’t know if antibodies grant you immunity to COVID-19. It’s possible that variations in strains are different enough that you can catch different forms of COVID-19, or it’s possible that the antibodies may degrade so quickly that you can catch the same virus again and again. We simply do not know how COVID-19 antibodies will affect future possible infections.
- If we do become immune to future COVID-19 infections, we do not know how long that immunity will last for. It could be years, it could be months, we do not know.
- We do not know the accuracy or reliability of the serological tests in use yet. Much more testing needs to be done before we can know how to interpret the results we are seeing.
The World Health Organization has put out a much more detailed statement on the issue, and you can find it here. I highly recommend giving it a read.
On a more personal note, I have now installed SkipTheDishes, Door Dash, and UberEats on my phone. I don’t know why it took me so long to use these apps previously, but they are SO convenient during a pandemic.
That’s all for now, stay safe everyone!
BC COVID-19 Info 