These Antibody tests - The Golden Bullet?

Hypothetical tests which will only possibly indicate who has had, not has, Corona.
Great, but only for those of us who haven't died by that point. Months from now.
God I'm becoming so weary of all this. Not your post, not at all, just this sort of stuff.
Chasing our tails as our house is on fire.
 
It would certainly help. I think a reliable and widely available vaccine would be the golden bulletin if this thing is going to come in waves.
I wonder if the government is trying to get a supply of faviparivir/avigan, which the Chinese were saying has been helpful. If that could significantly lower the mortality rate it might help take some of the fear out of it all over time.
Also I wonder if they are experimenting with using any of the other anti viral drugs much? I will see if I can find anything out.
 
I believe there are many out there who have or had the virus without knowing it. Showing no or only minor symptoms. Tom Hanks got it in Australia when they supposedly only had a few hundred cases. What are the chances of that ? Idris Elba had it with no symptoms, only found out because he was tested.

If there are higher proportion of people out there who have had the virus than we think, with little impact on their health, that will dramatically change the government projections.

Vaccines and cures are obviously the priority, but they take months/years of clinical testing. I presume antibody tests can be rolled out quickly. If we have them we have a better idea of what is happening + we can identify people who can safely go back to work or help people.
 
Interestingly on the subject of antibodies the Chinese have been experimenting with injecting blood plasma from recovered people into critically ill patients (hard to do on a mass scale, and risk of passing on other illnesses), and an American research company is looking at following up on this by developing a serum form of two antibodies they think they are close to identifying, which would then be synthetically manufactured. Sounds promising?
It seems like the anti malarial drug could help reduce infection rates. Avagan could reduce mortality if used early enough, and one or two other drugs show promise, but the problem is once you display symptoms you are already quite badly infected, and it seems nothing tried so far is proving very successful. Early days still?
 
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Not a silver bullet but will help provide better data to use for the infection modelling and will help manage critical resources by allowing 'immune' individuals to return to work.

The silver bullet is a widely available, effective mass vaccination program which seems to be 18 months away. Or that the virus mutates to a less infectious and/or lethal variant which is unlikely.
 
'If there are higher proportion of people out there who have had the virus than we think, with little impact on their health, that will dramatically change the government projections. '

That will show that the virus is possibly* more infectious than has been fed into the model (ie more people have been infected) but will show that the hospitalisation, ICU and mortality rates will be lower than expected.

There is an assumption in the model that half of carriers are asymptomatic (carry virus but show no symptoms) and asymptomatic people are infectious for 7 days and half of - if the data shows that they are infectious for significantly less than that time and there are significantly greater than half asymtomatic carriers then the curve will be flattened quicker with less mortaility and less chance of NHS ventilator capacity being surpassed.. Achieving herd immunity is still a pipe dream as the numbers required to be infected to achieve this will still be huge and if to be reached prior to a vaccine being available will result in the NHS resources being overwhelmed for a periods of time.
 
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