Antibody test approved!

[WindFlower92]

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-antibody-test-approval-news-europe-uk-accuracy-abbot-a9490026.html

Some good news!

Ooh! That'll be good...

That is amazing news! Will be a game-changer in managing post-lockdown properly.

It's promising but we still don't know how much immunity people get and for how long.

www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19

True @LangClegsInSpace but at least we'll know either way...

We also don't know about the specificity of this test.

We also don't know about the specificity of this test.
The article said the test had more than 99% specificity.

Even at 99% specificity the number of real positive will still be equal to the number of false positives.

In other words the same number of people will be falsely thinking they've had as those that have genuinely had it.

I assume that everyone would therefore have to have two tests, a few days apart and sent to a different lab to reduce the number of false positives.

Well I thought it was a good step in the right direction!

Excellent news. Next step they'll be able to look at what antibody levels give immunity and whether or not immunity degrades over time, there's a lot more knowledge to come from that.

Can anyone explain the 99%specificity further? I thought it would mean that for every 100 people who had it 99 would get a positive result and 1 would get negative?

So, the two important characteristics of a test are sensitivity and specificity.

If a test is 99% sensitive, if you tested 100 known positive samples, you would get 99 positive (correct) results and 1 false negative result.

If a test is 99% specific, if you tested 100 known negative samples, you would get 99 negative (correct) results and 1 false positive result.

It's important to note that these are lab based tests: I'm guessing they're ELISAs, but the article doesn't say.

Sounds really promising then.