A technician holds a container with test tubes containing live samples during the opening of the new COVID-19 testing lab at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, amid the coronavirus disease epidemic in Glasgow, Britain April 22, 2020. Andrew Milligan/Pool via REUTERS
BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — It doesn’t tell the whole story, but doctors hope antibody testing will give them some clues about COVID-19.
“There’s good reason to know how widespread has the epidemic become,” said Dr. Ryan Westergaard, Wisconsin’s Chief Medical Officer. “We at the state are systematically screening people throughout the state for several different projects to understand how many people have antibodies as something that reflects past infection.”
One of those studies, the Past Antibody COVID-19 Community Survey, or PACCS, has started its testing in Brown County.
“We have vaccines for the flu or smallpox or chickenpox even. We have lots of data and evidence, I think, that can help us combat those viruses. COVID-19, we’ve basically started from the ground up,” said Claire Paprocki with Brown County Health and Human Services. “Every test, every antibody test, all the research and things that we’re doing will just help us have a better understanding of how to combat the virus and then how to protect those most vulnerable or most at risk.”
Researchers reached out to about 3,000 people around the state in the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin, or SHOW, program to help with this study.
“If we find out that there’s very little exposure through these antibody tests or infection, that’s okay too,” said Kristen Malecki, SHOW Director and Principal Investigator. “We’ll just have some more answers to this complicated puzzle that is COVID-19.”
If someone thinks they may have been infected with COVID-19 before it was widely publicized, or known to have been here, this study may have some answers for you as well.
“One of the questions we’ll ask is if you think you may have had it, because of symptoms or whatever, when do you think that may have been? And we can start to answer some questions about how long these antibodies last and is this antibody testing really a good way to measure the prevalence of the infection in the population,” said Malecki.
Antibody testing began Monday at the Brown County Public Health building and will run through Friday. Ideally, those SHOW study volunteers would return three more times over the course of this next year.
County Officials say at the end of every day this week, the DHS drives the samples collected to its lab in Madison. They say results come back in about 2-3 days.
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