Instead of directly testing patients for COVID-19, medical experts might soon have a faster, easier, and cheaper alternative to identifying the virus: testing for immunity.
Scanwell Health and LemonAid, two companies that specialize in detecting and addressing medical problems outside of the doctor’s office, are now seeking US government approval for an assessment process that might allow people to send in coronavirus tests from the safety of their own homes.
It’s a quick method. After filling out an online questionnaire, patients at home put in an order for a testing kit. That questionnaire is then evaluated by a medical professional who will determine if the patient is a likely COVID-19 carrier.
If so, a testing kit will be next-day mailed to the patient’s home where they will be able to take a finger-prick test and send in a picture of the results to a doctor. From there, the results will help determine if they’ve been exposed to the virus.
For hospitals bogged down by unconfirmed COVID cases, this could be a game changer. For now, inadequate testing periods and insufficient hospital resources have been two of the greatest obstacles in the fight against the spread of coronavirus.
In an article to the Washington Post, Marc Lipsitch, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, noted that a lack of medical capacity was contributing to a lack of an awareness about the severity of the crisis as a whole.
“We don’t have enough physical test kits, or enough human power to run large-scale testing,” Lipsitch explained. “The result is that we have no idea how many people are infected with the coronavirus or how fast the virus is spreading.”
But identifying cases becomes ever harder when the majority of infections don’t look much different from a cough. According to Situation Report 46, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that as many as 80 percent of COVID-19 cases could be mild or even asymptomatic. The remaining minority—20 percent of infections—are deemed severe or critical. This means that the sum number of people going to the hospital with a severe case doesn’t accurately represent the number of existing infections.
Statistics from the front lines in hospitals and emergency rooms confirm that the vast majority of people going in for testing at medical centers are coming back with positive results. But expects at the WHO say this can only mean that there are plenty of cases that conventional testing isn’t detecting.
"If 80-90 percent of the people test positive, you are probably missing a lot of cases," Michael Ryan, the executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program, told audiences last week.
The new at-home testing kit proposed by Scanwell and LemonAid will directly help address unidentified cases of the virus. Its solution is focused not at detecting people presently infected with COVID-19, but rather on determining exposure.
“Rather than looking for the virus itself, we are actually looking for antibodies in your blood,” Dr. Jack Jeng, a chief medical officer at Scanwell, informed viewers. “Antibodies are formed by your body when you’ve been exposed to viruses and bacteria.”
According to reporting to NBC news, the test isn’t a treatment and it won’t tell patients if they’re presently contagions. But the test does tell patients if their bodies have developed antibodies to fight the disease.
If the test comes back positive, the subject has been exposed to the disease and their body might already be on the road to immunity. If the test comes back negative, either the patient hasn’t been exposed or their body hasn’t started producing antibodies.
Either way, the test must be considered in light of other factors such as the presence of coughing or fevers. Cases that have traces of antibodies but lack symptoms most likely indicate that a patient has had COVID and has recovered. Inversely, a case with symptoms but with no antibodies might mean that the disease is still in its infectious stages.
Stephen Chen, the CEO of Scanwell says that the new test will prove a useful tool in the fight against coronavirus, but doesn’t replace testing for the virus itself.
"While the gold standard for diagnosis is still the PCR test, given the growing shortage of swabs and reagents, a rapid serology test is beneficial in that it allows for wide-scale testing," Chen told audiences.
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