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Comment by mercora | Hacker News Reader

how easy is it to test for these antibodies for a layman? could people actually easily get tested prior to considering a vaccination?

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There are commercially available antibody tests that can distinguish between antibodies from natural infection and from the common vaccines.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/resources/anti...

>The first vaccines distributed in the United States induce antibodies to S protein. Thus, presence of antibodies to N protein indicates previous natural infection regardless of vaccination status, while presence of antibodies to S protein indicates either previous natural infection or vaccination.

It's available and getting cheaper pretty quickly. Hopefully others can chime in, seems like a promising path to take.

In my experience, the finger prick blood test cost $25 and 15 minutes. This test is for blood antibodies. This is not the test for active infection, such as nasal PCR.

The test is easy, but has a relatively high false positive rate. It also may use up lab resources that could be put to other uses.

The other wrinkle (and possibly the most important one) is that we don’t want to create a system where antivaxxers have an incentive to deliberately infect themselves and/or others.

> The test is easy, but has a relatively high false positive rate.

The FDA approved Roche serology test has a specificity greater than 99.8% and sensitivity of 100% (14 Days post-PCR confirmation) https://www.roche.com/media/releases/med-cor-2020-05-03.htm

I wouldn't say 0.02% is a particularly high FP rate.

I think GP is saying that people who are no longer sick or infected, such as a month later, show false lositives

I was under the impressing that the Roche test was an outlier, and that most other tests do not match that. Most other tests have issues with cross reactivity with common cold antibodies.

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