A test to find out whether people have been infected with coronavirus in the past has been approved by health officials in England.
Public Health England called the antibody test, developed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, a “very positive development”.
The blood test looks for antibodies created by the immune system when someone is infected by the virus. Antibodies usually offer some level of immunity, for a variable amount of time. Until now, officials were unsure over the reliability of these type of tests.
Professor John Newton, the national coordinator of the UK coronavirus testing programme, said: “Such a highly specific antibody test is a very reliable marker of past infection.
“This in turn may indicate some immunity to future infection, although the extent to which the presence of antibodies indicates immunity remains unclear.”
