It’s time to start testing coronavirus immunity

President Donald Trump isn’t the only one who wants to reopen the country as quickly as possible as it deals with the coronavirus pandemic. Everyone wants that — we want to get businesses and schools up and running again, and we want to get back to our normal lives, which include seeing friends and colleagues in person instead of through Zoom and Skype.
But unlike the president, most people are aware of how dangerous it would be to try to return to normal too soon. In a country of 330 million people, fewer than
1 million will have been tested by the end of this month. (As of March 26, 519,000 people had been tested, including 122,000 in New York State, according to the Covid-19 Testing Project.)
We’ve also learned that while older people are especially vulnerable to the virus, the young are hardly immune; letting people return to work now based on their age would be insanely risky. Data compiled by New York City, for instance, shows that 18% of those hospitalised in the city are younger than 44; nationwide, 12% of those admitted to intensive care as of March 16 were between 20 and 44. The truth is, we simply don’t know how widespread the virus is in the population, which means we’re flying blind.
Given the inherent difficulties of the so-called PCR tests (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) — which can be done only by healthcare workers wearing protective gear, require equipment that is in short supply and can take days to get results — it will be months before scientists are comfortable giving the all-clear sign.
The fact that government incompetence delayed significant testing for several months hasn’t helped either. Although the Food and Drug Administration is now allowing people to self-swab, that only reduces the risk for healthcare workers; it doesn’t eliminate it.
But there appears to be another way, a side-door approach that might make it possible for some people — maybe even a lot of them — to emerge from self-isolation and get back to their lives.
Antibody tests — simple blood tests that can detect whether a person has developed antibodies, and thus immunity, from the coronavirus — could well be the answer. They are easy to administer and easy to scale. They don’t require healthcare workers to wear special equipment. Results come back in hours instead of days. And they could be ready for deployment sooner than you might think.
Like anything else, antibody tests have some drawbacks, which we’ll get to shortly. Let’s focus first on their potential benefits. A serology test that can
detect antibodies for the coronavirus means it can tell whether someone has developed immunity to the disease. Humans develop antibodies after a virus has made them ill; they are proteins that fight back against a foreign element in the body, eventually repelling it.
Covid-19, as we now know, affects different people differently. Some people don’t survive it, while for many others, it can feel like a bad case of the flu. Scientists also believe that millions of people have most likely contracted the coronavirus without any symptoms at all.
Can you see how useful an antibody test could be? Imagine that healthcare workers could test everyone in an entire community. They would immediately learn who had potentially developed immunity and could be freed from self-isolation. The test could also tell whether someone has never been infected by the virus and thus can’t spread it to others. Lower-risk, uninfected people who don’t work in high-contact environments might be able to join the immune population as long as they took proper precautions.
In such a scenario, a potentially large percentage of the population could return to normal life, and only those still at risk would continue to self-quarantine. Crucially, we could identify healthcare workers who could treat infected patients without putting themselves at as much risk. Such testing is already available in China, South Korea and Europe, according to David Ho, the well-known scientist at Columbia University. “It is extremely useful for surveying a population,” he told Walter Isaacson last week on the PBS program “Amanpour & Company.”
Antibody tests can also identify recovered individuals who can donate blood; their plasma can be refined into an experimental Covid-19 treatment for very sick patients. It’s a throwback to a method pioneered over a century ago, but with novel drugs a long way off, it’s what
we have.
Ho said that one problem is that all the manufacturers of antibody tests are abroad, but that’s not quite right. In Hauppauge, Long Island, there is a company called United Biomedical Inc, a 30-year-old, privately held firm with a great deal of experience with viral diseases. According to Mei Mei Hu, the company’s chief executive officer and co-founder, United Biomedical’s first product was an antibody test for HIV.
“With coronavirus, it made sense for us to jump in,” said Hu.
—Bloomberg

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast “The Shrink Next Door”

Max Nisen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, pharma and health care. He previously wrote about management and corporate strategy for Quartz and Business Insider