The Food and Drug Administration gave crisis endorsement to a COVID-19 immunizer test that gloats close flawless exactness, the organization said Sunday.
Swiss drugmaker Roche said the new test, which decides if somebody had a past disease, has demonstrated 100% precise at recognizing antibodies in the blood and 99.8% exact at precluding the nearness of them.
The organization said the test requires intravenous blood draws, with higher exactness than finger-prick tests.
“If you take blood from a finger prick, you will never be able to achieve the same level of specificity that you will achieve … when you take blood from the vein,” Thomas Schinecker, the organization’s head of diagnostics, said.
“You have to have very, very high specificity. Even 0.1% or 0.2% makes a difference.”
Schinecker said the tests are a significant advance in deciding if somebody may have insusceptibility, yet recognized that more research is required to decide if antibodies shield individuals from being reinfected.
“Since this virus is not well known, one can hypothesize, but the proof will take longer,” Schinecker said. “Testing these people … is key to seeing whether or not people really have developed immunity.”