Coronavirus: US report identifies most accurate antibody tests

A new study of coronavirus antibody tests that are currently on the market revealed that at least eight out of 14 had an accuracy rate of more than 95 percent and three of those were more than 99 percent accurate, but doctors remain concerned that more work needs to be done before they can be solely relied upon to restart the world's economy. Two separate studies of 14 antibody tests carried out by a team of 50 researchers working for the Covid Testing Project in San Francisco, who were partly funded by Mark Zuckerburg's charity, the Chan Zuckerburg Biohub, and others at Massachusetts General Hospital found that only three - Sure Biotech, Wondfo Biotech and and one in-house made by the researchers - had an accuracy rate of more than 99 percent. The antibodies were found most often more than 20 days after the onset of symptoms in all of the tests A breakdown shows how prevalent the two types of antibodies - IgM and IgG - were in each of the tests and how it changed over time A table from the researchers' study reveals the specificity of 12 tests found that they ranged from being 84.3 percent to 100 percent specific in identifying COVID-19 antibodies They sampled blood from 80 people known to be infected with the coronavirus along with 108 samples donated before the pandemic and 52 samples from people had other viral infections but tested negative for COVID-19. TEST ACCURACY These are the specificity percentages for each test in detecting both the IgG and IgM antibodies; Sure Biotech - 100% Wondfo Biotech - 99.1% In-house ELISA - 99.1 % UCP Bioscience - 98.1% Premier - 97.2% Innovita - 96.3% Bioperfctus - 95.2% VivaDiag - 95% Epitope ELISA - 89.8% DecomBio - 89.7% BioMedomics - 86.9% DeepBlue - 84.3% Two other tests were examined by Massachusetts General Hospital but it is unclear which they were.