I think it’s helpful to know, and that these efforts are by no means mutually exclusive: we should simultaneously be trying to find a vaccine, increasing testing, increase tracking and tracing, improving our quarantining, increasing our ppe supplies (ideally eventually getting to the point where everyone can get an n95 mask), increasing access to hand washing, improving our social distancing (including the spit guards protecting cashiers), investigating treatments, tracking how many people have antibodies while also learning whether that confers immunity.
If antibodies confer immunity, those people could be directed to help the elderly, to work in healthcare settings, to work in customer-facing jobs.
Even if the Stanford Seroprevalence study is deeply flawed, we will be getting a lot more data, and even if antibodies *don’t* confer immunity, because Antibody tests are cheaper, faster and easier to roll out on a large scale, they could be helpful to understand who is getting infected, which could inform our future measures.
(* assuming we can get some that are accurate)
If antibodies confer immunity, those people could be directed to help the elderly, to work in healthcare settings, to work in customer-facing jobs.
Even if the Stanford Seroprevalence study is deeply flawed, we will be getting a lot more data, and even if antibodies *don’t* confer immunity, because Antibody tests are cheaper, faster and easier to roll out on a large scale, they could be helpful to understand who is getting infected, which could inform our future measures.
(* assuming we can get some that are accurate)