Covenant Health started antibody testing this week that can determine if a person has been infected with the coronavirus. These tests will provide a clearer picture of how many people in the Lubbock community have been infected. On the first day of testing, Covenant saw 150 patients. During a Thursday news conference, Dr. Ron Cook, local healthy authority, said he has already seen a few shocking results from these tests.
“I had a member of the hospital faculty that never knew he was even sick and tested positive for the IgG,” he said. IgG is the type of antibody they’re testing for. “[The staff member] got exposed, was non-symptomatic, may have spread it to others, we don’t know.”
Cook explains that there are two types of antibodies, IgG (Immunoglobulin G) and IgM (Immunoglobulin M). IgG antibodies are those that are believed to give us immunity. “At this point it is way too early for us to even determine, whether or not if you build your own natural immunity to [COVID-19] and how long it’s going to last.” Those tests are currently underway and will take months, even years to yield answers.
Dr. Harvinder Gill has some concerns of his own about the assumptions circulating about antibody testing. He’s been working on developing a vaccine for COVID-19 since February. “We are assuming that antibodies against the coronavirus are in the patient’s blood so they are protected from future infections, and therefore they can go into the public,” Gill said. This belief has no basis, he said, because no one has tested this hypothesis yet.
While antibody testing cannot guarantee a person is immune to the virus, it will hopefully shed valuable light on when and where it has spread in Lubbock. Just this week, Bastrop County Judge, Paul Pape, received results from an antibody test that showed he had contracted the virus in early February. These results show that COVID-19 may have spread through the community earlier than previously believed.
“We’ve tested a number of individuals in the healthcare industry so far,” Cook said. “But very few have antibodies to it. So that tells me that they didn’t get infected and we’re doing a pretty good job of protecting ourselves with the personal protective equipment.”
