Health

so there are going to be a lot of fakes out there and some good ones might even make their way into hospitals swamped with frightened people.

In addition, they only show that someone has been infected and that the immune system has recognized the threat. It might be in imminent threat, the person getting the illness days later, or recovery from an illness. The first AIDS tests were for antibodies and we all know those didn't signal immunity, just infection.

Most known coronaviruses in the human population produce infection followed by immunity. The caution is with MERS, in which the immunity started to fade after 2 years, although I have seen no record of a documented second case of the disease, and if so, whether secondary cases had the same high fatality rate as the original.

I'll welcome a good, standardized antibody test. I'd like to know if what I'm calling a mild case of "presumptive" was it or just an especially weird case of flu.

However, even with a possible increase in the percentage of asymptomatic cases, a positive antibody test shouldn't make anyone who hasn't been ill feel bulletproof, and it should make anyone who has been ill to maintain some caution in case immunity is either incomplete or nonpermanent.