COVID19 Testing

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends as its main advice to governments testing for the COVID19 virus.  As I wrote earlier, however, testing to see whether someone has the virus is actually rather pointless, and potentially dangerous.  If I am tested and its negative, I might then take that as meaning that I'm free to continue as normal, but a couple of minutes after being tested I may easily come into contact with someone who has the virus, and thereby become contagious.  If i only come into contact with people in the 80% of the population who are at no serious risk from the virus that doesn't matter, but if say I am a health worker, or social care worker, and come into contact with vulnerable people in the other 20% of the population it matters a whole lot.

The only real point of testing is to test to see whether people have had the virus, and have obtained immunity to it.  In other words, to test whether they have COVID19 antibodies.  That is very worthwhile, because everyone who has COVID19 antibodies is, thereby, immune to it, and also cannot pass it on to anyone else.  What the real purpose of testing would want to see is that hopefully a large number of people have such antibodies, so that a large amount of herd immunity is being created within the population.  Anyone with such immunity can have contact with those in the at risk 20% safely.

What is required, therefore, is tests to find these antibodies, progress on which is apparently being made by some laboratories.