March 26, 2020

expert comment on the distribution of the UK’s first COVID-19 antibody tests

Comment on how the UK’s first COVID-19 antibody tests  may be distributed.

Prof Sheila Bird, formerly Programme Leader, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, said:

“Doctors and nurses number around 1 million in the UK. They, and science-led surveillance to inform modelling and policy, are therefore a priority once UK takes delivery of 3.5 million antibody tests.

“Specifically, I suggest that well-designed COVID-19 antibody surveillance among healthcare workers could take place over 10 to 20 weeks – with each healthcare worker being assigned a random sample-week and invited to provide no-names brief demographical information and subjective (or objective) assessment of whether they had had COVID-19.

“Such surveillance could potentially claim up to 1 million of UK’s 3.5 million antibody tests – even before other essential workers, such as emergency service personnel, are considered.

“Importantly, if the antibody tests live up to their IGM and IGG test-promise, they will enable us to track, week by week, not only antibody prevalence but also the incidence of recent-past infection. Doing the latter robustly requires a substantially larger numbers of surveillance-tests-per-week than does surveillance for prevalence alone.

“Repeat blood donors are another group who give public service to the NHS and could constitute another surveillance-tier of persons, male and female, aged 18-59 years.

“Of course, if the UK’s delivery were 3.5 million tests per week, then instead of a third to 40%  of the initial 3.5 million tests being deployed for science-led surveillance, then only one in 50 of them would need to be corralled for such essential surveillance studies.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19/

Declared interests

Prof Sheila Bird: “I have family members who are medical professionals.”