It will cost me less than $200. The price isn’t an issue. There are plenty of tests so I would not be denying someone who has an urgent need.
This is a blood draw test that takes three days for results. You can’t have had symptoms or have taken any kind of cold meds in the previous ten days.
I don’t think that I have been exposed…but…I went to a lot of large gatherings between November and March 9th some of which were in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I am an essential employee and have been working. No one at my work has come down with COVID to my knowledge. The city of Santa Barbara has had very few cases. Only one death and fewer than ten serious hospitalizations. There haven’t even been that many deaths within 100 miles of us.
If I have antibodies, I could relax a little. I’d still take precautions in public, of course.
Value for money is probably nil to you.
If the test is validated and has a very good specificity (ie very low false positives) the data point will be useful to others.
If the test is of dubious specificity, it is worse than useless. A positive test for you would almost certainly be a false positive.
Whether there are any tests with good enough specificity available yet, I don’t know.
There are several clinics here (TX) saying they can do the anti-body tests. The fee tends to be around 200. I think we’ve already had the virus and it could improve our lives if we knew for sure.
I have not been able to get any answers as to the effectiveness of these tests, and getting a false positive result could result in my at-risk spouse becoming infected because I was letting him off the property. At this point, we are not going to be tested. When the tests have gotten more testing and are more reliable we will be right there.
I’m in SB too so I have a vested interest in your post Where can you get serology testing? I wasn’t aware there was anywhere in the county that was doing it!
I’d be interested in getting tested. For the last three weeks my kids and I have been living with a low-grade intermittent fever with minor fatigue, which is getting better only now. My daughter has had a cough which has gone away now and is complaining of mild shortness of breath (generally when there’s something she doesn’t want to do, so I’m not entirely sure how seriously to take this), but my son and I have not had any other symptoms. Normally I wouldn’t think twice about it and chalk it down to back-to-back colds, but we’ve been AT HOME for more than four weeks now, where the heck is this cold coming from and why is it lasting so long?? I also thought it was allergy related for a while but if it were allergy related I don’t think it would be getting better now. On the other hand, it really wasn’t very serious (no worse than a mild cold), and my husband never got sick at all, so I still think it is more likely that it was some other sort of cold (maybe it mutated in our house and reinfected us??). But I just don’t know!
If I came back positive, I’d treat that as a tentative result and take my kids to be tested. If we all came back positive I would take that as very indicative that we’d had it. (My spouse never got sick, so he would go last.)
At this stage the tests are so new, I would worry about their accuracy. If you weren’t paying fine, but to shell out $200 for something that may not be correct is not worth it.
My wife had antibody testing yesterday. We should have the results Monday or Tuesday.
The test is from Boston Heart Diagnostics. It has a very small amount of patients tested for validation.
Results in Negative or Positive in Hospitalized Patients Based on PCR Nasal Swab Analysis: In 26 negative patients,
median IgM and IgG values were 0.27 AU/mL and 0.05 AU/mL, respectively, and all patients had IgG values < 1.0 AU/mL,
and 25/26 (96%) had IgM values < 1.0 AU/mL. In 10 positive patients, median IgM and IgG values were 3.39 AU/mL and
44.98 IU/mL, respectively. All patients had IgG values > 1.0 AU/mL and 9/10 (90.0%) subjects had IgM values > 1.0 AU/mL
(range: 3.225 – > 100.00 AU/mL.
Results in PCR Negative or Positive Outpatients: In 5 negative subjects, median IgM and IgG values were 0.35 AU/mL
and 0.06 AU/mL, with all values being < 1.0 AU/mL. In 5 positive subjects, median IgM and IgG values were 6.01 AU/mL
and 5.85 AU/mL, respectively, with all values being > 1.0 AU/mL. *
We likely were infected while in China in early January. I will update with results.
Not wrong, 31 negative and 15 positive. And the numbers quoted don’t give a huge amount of confidence in a clear separation of numbers in the results.
Given you may or may not have contracted the virus, your test doesn’t even help improve the test. I hope you didn’t pay for the test. If you didn’t, you got value for money.*
*OK, that is a trifle hash. If you get back numbers with high titers, you probably have a result. But the test is not a go/no-go test.
So I consulted a friend of mine who works in this field. She said that if it were her she would only use tests that had the FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), which has gone through more thorough validation testing than tests that have the Emergency Use Notification.
The companies that have the EUA are here:
(if you do a page search for “serology” you’ll find the ones who have EUA.)
My wife’s antibody test was negative. I’m not sure what to make of that. We were seemingly ill with COVID after traveling through Beijing in early January.
The test was paid for by insurance. It is not listed on** raspberry hunter**'s FDA EUA page.
We are both nurses though she doesn’t have direct patient contact. I will likely wait for a vetted test and take that barring any new infection.
Where can you get serology testing? I wasn’t aware there was anywhere in the county that was doing it!