You can now take a COVID-19 antibody test, but should you?

A growing number of people locally and nationally are looking back to when they were sick in March and even earlier this year and wondering if perhaps they had COVID-19 and didn’t know it.

New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics, which has three offices in Wichita, now has what it calls the first commercially available antibody test for individuals to take without having to go through their doctors.

“We’re still trying to understand what having antibodies means,” said Kim Gorode, Quest senior manager for external communications.

“It’s hard to say exactly right now, but there could be more implications in the future.”

Garold Minns, the Sedgwick County health officer who in March signed a stay-at-home order to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, said that the FDA is allowing the release of testing without its customary review “because of the pandemic and the urgency of it.”

“I’d say in the medical community, the jury is out on these antibody tests.”

Quest’s $119 serology test, in which blood serum is tested after a lab draws blood from a patient’s arm, is available to people 18 and older.

Anyone interested can go to the QuestDirect program at www.getquesttest.com and answer a series of questions that a doctor will then review to decide if the potential patient meets qualifications to be tested.

“What the questions are trying to determine are whether or not you could possibly be currently infected,” Gorode said. “It takes 14 days for your body to develop those antibodies.”

If you’ve been sick within 14 days, she said the test is “a waste of your money, basically.”

Patients who qualify will be invited to a Quest office to have blood drawn and will have results in a day or two.

Nationally, Gorode said Quest can perform 150,000 tests a day and should be up to 200,000 tests a day by the middle of May.

Unlike patients who go through physicians, and therefore may be able to have the tests covered by insurance, Quest patients have to pay out of pocket. Gorode said they can use FSA and HSA money.

Once a patient gets test results, Gorode said they’ll be given a number to have a follow-up call with a physician if they choose.

“There’s no real course of treatment after,” she said. “The follow-up is typically, ‘What does this mean?’ ”

That’s the main problem with the test, though. No one is yet sure what a positive test result means.

Minns said there are other issues as well, including how good a particular test or vendor is. He said there are some bad tests but that even the better ones don’t give clear answers.

“It’s not just black and white.”

Someone who tests positive and has a relative who has the coronavirus “might make the case, ‘I don’t need to go into quarantine because I’m immune to it,’ ” Minns said.

Except the tests don’t prove that — at least not yet.

Minns said some vaccinations, such as the one for measles, work well. You get the vaccination, and you’re probably never going to get the measles.

However other vaccinations, such as the ones administered every year for the flu, only last a season — if they work at all.

“Immunity is very complex,” said Minns, who is an infectious disease physician and dean of the KU School of Medicine-Wichita.

Also, he said there are other coronaviruses, and sometimes antibodies cross over between viruses. That could affect results.

Nor is it clear whether people who have already had COVID-19 need to get a vaccine for it once it is available.

“There’s lots of questions with this test,” Minns said. “We need more science. We need more data.”

For people who want to have the test regardless, Minns suggests going to a doctor.

“Someone’s going to have to help you decipher it.”

Still, Minns said he doesn’t know what patients will do with the results.

“Like any test, what is the question you’re trying to answer? If you’re doing it out of curiosity, I’d say save your money.”

Even for someone who tests positive for the virus, Minns said there should be another test in their future whenever a verified test is released.

“I would repeat it to see . . . if you’re really immune.”

This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 4:34 PM.