The national immunity task force has started testing thousands of blood samples for COVID-19 antibodies and should be able to produce a more detailed picture of how many Canadians have been infected with the novel coronavirus within a couple of weeks.
The national immunity task force has started testing thousands of blood samples for COVID-19 antibodies and should be able to produce a more detailed picture of how many Canadians have been infected with the novel coronavirus within a couple of weeks.
It will be much longer, however, before we know more about what kind of protection against future infection having the antibodies provides, said Dr. Timothy Evans, executive director of the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.
Plus, he said, most of the people whose blood is being tested will not be informed of the results because of how the blood is being collected for testing.
“There won’t be an opportunity for individuals to find out their status,” said Evans, who is also director of the McGill School of Population and Global Health in Montreal.
More than 105,000 Canadians have tested positive for COVID-19 since the coronavirus infection was identified in Canada in late January, while many others were sick but couldn’t get tested because provinces were limiting who could access the procedure until just a few weeks ago.
Evans also said a significant number of people get the infection and show no symptoms and will have no clue they were ever sick. Immunity testing in other countries has suggested the actual infection rate is 10 to 20 times more than the number of confirmed cases, he said.
There are multiple prongs to the task force’s plan to figure out the true infection rate here, starting with running antibody tests on 40,000 sam