Posted 20 March 2020 - 06:02 PM
Singapore claims to have an antibody test for the Corona virus. Does anyone have any information on this? Has it been made available to other countries in the world?
https://www.sciencem...irus-infections
Posted 23 March 2020 - 08:18 PM
I think it will be very interesting when they start testing for c-19 antibodies. My guess is that Wuhan Virus arrived in the US no later than December last year. I think you're going to find people testing positive for c-19 that never realized they had it, or who had some upper respiratory infection earlier in the year before the first "official" c-19 case in the US.
At my workplace we had a very contagious and significant upper respiratory virus go through sometime in the first week or two in February. It was clearly brought in by an employee that had returned from a trip to California. Somewhere between one third and one half of the facility ended up symptomatic. At the time I commented that I had never seen a more contagious UR virus. I was one of the last people to get it. It was only significant for about 3 ~ 4 days for me, but lingered with some for weeks. The symptoms were a good match, but those symptoms are somewhat generic for a UR infection.
Several of us have wondered if this wasn't c-19.
Posted 23 March 2020 - 09:39 PM
I think it will be very interesting when they start testing for c-19 antibodies. My guess is that Wuhan Virus arrived in the US no later than December last year. I think you're going to find people testing positive for c-19 that never realized they had it, or who had some upper respiratory infection earlier in the year before the first "official" c-19 case in the US.
At my workplace we had a very contagious and significant upper respiratory virus go through sometime in the first week or two in February. It was clearly brought in by an employee that had returned from a trip to California. Somewhere between one third and one half of the facility ended up symptomatic. At the time I commented that I had never seen a more contagious UR virus. I was one of the last people to get it. It was only significant for about 3 ~ 4 days for me, but lingered with some for weeks. The symptoms were a good match, but those symptoms are somewhat generic for a UR infection.
Several of us have wondered if this wasn't c-19.
As you probably read from the other coronavirus thread. The same happened at my workplace. I was patient zero and had traveled through international airports and mingled with people from several countries at a wedding.
I tend to think it was circulating as well, but it is odd that it didn't hit a nursing home before the Washington State incident. Then again, maybe there were some nursing homes hit hard but everyone just chalked it up to the flu - although usually they would do testing if a significant number of residents perished. Flu outbreaks in nursing homes commonly have over 5% CFR (case fatality rate).
A testing company that my clinic works with notified us that an antibody test will be coming soon.
Posted 23 March 2020 - 11:51 PM
Despite COVID-19, this as been a bad year for bad colds and flu. Prior to the current COVID-19 disaster, many of us endured serious creeping cruds and flu dating all the way back to November. My oldest daughter's family including her 2 toddlers were passing it back and forth for the whole month of November and into December. My daughter, who works in the school system, was sick with upper respiratory for the better part of a month. In spite of spending Thanksgiving weekend in their house, my wife, 19 month old toddler and myself managed to dodge it at that time. However, my wife ended up with it the week before Christmas, we suspect from friends at Church. My wife ended up sick with nasty upper respiratory (including the dry cough, fevor, chills, and aches) for a full 3 weeks and just as she was getting over it and I thought our toddler and I were going to duck it, my toddler came down with it followed by me 2 or 3 days latter. My toddler was only sick with a snotty nose for about a week to 10 days but I was sick for a full 4 weeks and I typically never get sick and when I have had a bad cold in the past it never lasts for more than a week or 10 days...never anything like this 4 weeks. It wasn't in my lungs but I had a ton of bronchial congestion coughing up phlegm. I never went to the Dr as a couple times I thought I was getting over it and then would relapse. I attributed the duration of my sickness (especially since I rarely get sick) to chronic sleep deprivation, averaging 5 hours at best the past couple months due to my toddler and work schedule. BTW, I'm 63 and I used to weather this type schedule better a few years ago. This all stretch over from November with my older daughter's family to December into February in my immediate family including myself. During this time, we discovered many of the people we know through church had also been sick with it and most were elderly. By January into February, many of my co-workers were suffering with it and many were obviously very sick for 2+ weeks. My point is that something very bad had been going around most of the winter and I personally know many elderly people in addition to all ages to have had it but unlike the current COVID-19, I never heard of anybody ending up in the hospital due to it or any of the elderly dying from it in spite of all the elderly I was aware caught it (and indicated it was very nasty like everybody else). It has only been in March where locally (or anywhere... I live in CO and my daughter in AZ) people have suddenly ended up critical on ventilators and people dying from it. My point is, I strongly believe the really bad crud that many had throughout the winter, as bad as it was, (I had never been that sick from cold or flu) was obviously not COVID-19.
Posted 24 March 2020 - 04:14 PM
Posted 24 March 2020 - 08:00 PM
This one? https://coronachecktest.com
Corona Rapid Test Kit
Covid-19 IgM/IgG
CoronaCheck is a rapid test for the Coronavirus (COVID-19) that delivers a result in ~10 minutes.
The mechanism of action is the qualitative detection of IgM and IgG antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 using a fingerstick blood specimen as an aid in the determination of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Professional Use Only
Looks like $499.00 for 25 tests so I guess you used a reseller? This one wants a medical license...
Similar test. No I bought direct.
The website "coronachecktest" looks fishy to me.
This is their main website https://2020gene.com/
Looks legit.
Posted 25 March 2020 - 01:25 PM
As you probably read from the other coronavirus thread. The same happened at my workplace. I was patient zero and had traveled through international airports and mingled with people from several countries at a wedding.
I tend to think it was circulating as well, but it is odd that it didn't hit a nursing home before the Washington State incident. Then again, maybe there were some nursing homes hit hard but everyone just chalked it up to the flu - although usually they would do testing if a significant number of residents perished. Flu outbreaks in nursing homes commonly have over 5% CFR (case fatality rate).
A testing company that my clinic works with notified us that an antibody test will be coming soon.
Yeah, I saw your post and our experience was quite similar.
Just to give an indication of how noteworthy this was at the time, we made up satirical posters with pictures of the employee that had brought the infection back from CA warning people to be on the lookout for "patient zero" and hung them up around the office. Ironically, some of the pictures of people in biohazard suits that were used were taken from news articles of what was going on in Wuhan at the time.
It could have well been some random upper respiratory virus. Some were tested for flu and those came back negative. But I would assume that there are things in circulation that are not flu and not covid-19 that can cause these symptoms. The most notable aspect of this thing was how communicable it was. I've never seen a virus run through a group of people so rapidly and thoroughly.
I assume when your test is available you'll test yourself for antibodies. Let us know what you find.
Posted 25 March 2020 - 06:09 PM
My clinics (outsourced) lab says they "are still working on instrumentation to validate their test". And it will be a few weeks before it is available.
https://accessmedlab.com/coronavirus
$ 149.00 for one test.
https://www.everlywe.../covid-19-test/
This one is only $135.
Posted 25 March 2020 - 06:34 PM
https://accessmedlab.com/coronavirus
$ 149.00 for one test.
https://www.everlywe.../covid-19-test/
This one is only $135.
Yes, they have the active coronavirus test, but I am still waiting on the antibody test.
Posted 26 March 2020 - 08:14 PM
UK in negotiations to buy antibody test. Article dated yesterday, but says the announcement was made on the 19th. So the tests must be coming on to the market.
Posted 27 March 2020 - 09:16 PM
Here is another test: https://www.raybiote...rapid-test-kit/
This company provides a lot more info about their product and has a disclaimer. It is a lot more expensive, which makes me think it is probably higher quality.
Posted 27 March 2020 - 09:41 PM
Anybody happen to see how long it takes from showing symptoms to having detectable antibodies?
The answer is, about 3 days after the onset of symptoms (nytimes article the other day).
given that incubation period is about a week (on average), from the point of infection it takes 10+ days to have detectable antibodies.
Posted 27 March 2020 - 09:49 PM
Here is another test: https://www.raybiote...rapid-test-kit/
This company provides a lot more info about their product and has a disclaimer. It is a lot more expensive, which makes me think it is probably higher quality.
Weird they do IgM/IgG separately so you would have to order both to be sure.
Posted 27 March 2020 - 11:44 PM
Here is another test: https://www.raybiote...rapid-test-kit/
This company provides a lot more info about their product and has a disclaimer. It is a lot more expensive, which makes me think it is probably higher quality.
Posted 28 March 2020 - 02:11 PM
It says 20 tests for $250 so that is $12.50 each sounds pretty cheap.
This is interesting :: Method of Detection:Colloidal Gold
How does that work?
Thanks for the correction on the price.
Posted 01 April 2020 - 02:05 PM
I'm intrigued by the prospect that many of us may already have had this and were mostly none the wiser. It's the one piece of knowledge that would be very liberating at this point in time. We had a close family member that had a terrible flu back in Jan/Feb time-frame and I think it's reasonable to suspect it was here even back then.
When the time comes, I'm counting on Longecity with it's ambitious members to be able to procure some antibody tests for us. I wouldn't want to do this unless the supply was plentiful, but would really love to do this test even if it was long after the worst is over.
Under no illusions that we could get this now, but indeed here it is already:
http://www.epitopedi.../covid-19-elisa
Edited by OP2040, 01 April 2020 - 02:08 PM.
Posted 01 April 2020 - 02:14 PM
Actually, lots of these already out there it seems. Unless I'm missing something, they do look like antibody tests for the current coronavirus, but could be wrong or they are there and just have not quite the right one.
https://www.antibodi...IgM Rapid Test/
With this many options floating around out there, I don't think it would interfere with the broader efforts. Why they are not being used already I have no idea, probably need a 20 year long clinical trial first.
Posted 01 April 2020 - 04:53 PM
Has anyone had success ordering an antibody test lately?
Most of the labs offering the test are restricting to large orders now (as of Monday), most of them are in backlog...like a 2 week wait time "because of increased demand", and most of the sites request a doctor/clinic do the ordering
If anyone has taken an antibody test, please post your result here.
Posted 24 April 2020 - 12:41 AM
Antibody test by Premier Biotech sounds good, according to this article about the USC study
a false positive rate of 0.5 percent was found in 371 samples. In subsequent tests by a Stanford laboratory, there were no false positives. "We think that the false positive rate of the tests is really low," Sood said.
Alas thy are " *Not for personal/home use. For professional in vitro diagnostic use only."
Now it'd be nice to know their rate of false negatives.
Posted 24 April 2020 - 01:16 AM
Post 450 is this thread already addressed these studies in not so positive but more realistic note (read down to get the real story):
https://news.yahoo.c...-161418566.html
New studies suggest huge undercount of coronavirus infections — but are they right?
The number of COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles County may be more than 50 times greater than the official count, according to preliminary results from a new study by the University of Southern California, which estimates that as many as 442,000 adult residents of Los Angeles County may have already been infected.
The implication, as lead USC investigator Neeraj Sood told reporters Monday, is that “the true extent of the infection in our communities” is far greater than previously known.
“We actually found that about 5 percent of Angelenos have in fact, probably, at some time, been infected with COVID-19,” explained Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the L.A. County Department of Public Health, which partnered with USC on the study. So now “we are able to understand what the real denominator is” in calculating the rate at which people who are infected develop symptoms, require hospitalization and die.
But should we trust those conclusions?
If accurate, these estimates would fundamentally change our understanding of the coronavirus. Experts have long suspected that real-time testing is only catching a fraction of the total infections. But they have tended to put that fraction somewhere between one in five and one in 20. If in reality we’re only identifying one in 50 infections, or fewer, that would make COVID-19 a lot less deadly than previously believed while also making it a lot more contagious (and asymptomatic “silent carriers” a lot more widespread). That would be a paradigm shift in how to combat the virus.
The problem, though, is that these studies may not be accurate.
Known as a “seroprevalance survey” or “serosurvey,” the preliminary USC study is the second of its kind to come out in the past few days. The first was conducted by Stanford University researchers in Santa Clara County, Calif. — aka Silicon Valley — and released Friday. Together they represent the first attempts at this kind of research in the U.S.
Both serosurveys worked the same way. Researchers recruited hundreds or thousands of local residents to participate. They tried to ensure their “sample” was representative of the county’s overall population. They tested all participants with the same serology test, which is supposed to reveal who has already been infected by detecting antibodies in their bloodstream — even if they never showed symptoms or were never tested for an ongoing infection by the more typical nasal-swab method. Then the researchers tallied up the total number of positive test results, divided it by the total number of participants and “scaled” that percentage to the population of the entire county to estimate the overall seroprevalence of COVID-19 in the area.
Both studies also produced similar — and similarly startling — numbers. In Los Angeles, the USC team found that 4.1 percent of its 863 study participants tested positive; applied to the county as a whole, and adjusted for statistical margin of error, that would mean that anywhere from 2.8 percent (221,000) to 5.6 percent (442,000) of Angelenos have been infected, according to the USC researchers. (By comparison, 423,000 people had tested positive for COVID-19 nationwide as of April 9, when the study concluded.) Meanwhile in Santa Clara, the Stanford team tested 3,330 residents and estimated that 2.5 percent (48,000) to 4 percent (81,000) of the county’s population has been infected — or 50 to 85 times the official number of confirmed cases there.
Yet statisticians and infectious disease experts have been poking holes in the Santa Clara study since the second it came out.
One criticism is that the antibody test they used — a kit purchased from Premier Biotech in Minneapolis — has a false positive rate as high as 1.7 percent, according to some estimates, meaning that even if you test only people who have never had the disease, as many as 1.7 percent of them would still test positive.
To a layperson, that sounds relatively low. But when your sample size is small and the disease you’re testing for is rare, it’s actually big enough to render your results potentially meaningless. Of the 3,330 Santa Clara residents tested, 50 came back positive — or 1.5 percent. Most or all of them, in other words, could have theoretically been false positives.
Another possible issue is the way the researchers “weighted” that raw result, adjusting it statistically to reflect the county’s demographics and account for the inaccuracy of the test. This is how they ultimately estimated that between 2.5 percent and 4 percent of residents have been infected. But as experts have noted, such weighting introduces a lot of subjective judgments that can potentially skew the results — especially when the thing you’re trying to measure has a percentage prevalence in the low single digits.
Statistician John Cherian of D. E. Shaw Research, a computational biochemistry company, made his own calculations given the test’s sensitivity and specificity — and conservatively estimated the proportion of truly positive people in the Stanford study to range from 0.2 percent to 2.4 percent of the Santa Clara population. Adjusting for demographics, Cherian’s calculations suggest that county prevalence could plausibly be under 1 percent.
A final possible sticking point is the sample itself. Participants were asked to volunteer via Facebook ads, meaning, as computational biologist and statistician Balaji S. Srinivasan has explained, that the study might have attracted people who thought they were exposed to the virus and wanted to get a test they couldn’t otherwise get — and that those people might have in turn recruited other exposed people. The result could have been a “biased,” nonrandom sample with more COVID-19-positive participants than the population at large.
The Stanford researchers attempted to account for these issues in their study, and on Sunday they said they are planning to release a detailed appendix that addresses the criticisms and incorporates many of these suggestions into the paper itself.
The USC team did not immediately release their methodology, so it’s difficult to compare their findings to Stanford’s. One difference, according to the lead investigator, was recruitment: Instead of using Facebook, USC called and emailed a random assortment of Angelenos from the database of an L.A. market research firm, then set quotas meant to mimic the demographics of the county as a whole. But it’s entirely possible that many of the potential issues with the Santa Clara study apply here as well. After all, USC used the exact same antibody test, the same lab and many of the same overseeing researchers as Stanford — plus the sample size (863) was much smaller. Neither preliminary study has been peer-reviewed yet.
So how can we know the true extent of the coronavirus pandemic? We can’t — at least not right now. The key is to wait until a bunch of different studies — conducted with different technologies and analytic approaches — come out.
That will happen soon enough. The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., just launched a serosurvey that will collect and analyze blood samples from as many as 10,000 volunteers. A UC Berkeley project, set to begin in May, will test a large and representative swath of 5,000 East Bay residents. UC San Francisco is now testing all 1,680 residents of rural Bolinas and 5,700 residents of San Francisco’s densely populated and largely Latino Mission District for evidence of the virus. And teams in China, Australia, Iceland, Italy and Germany are expected to release the results of their serosurveys in the coming days.
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