South Africa: Antibody Testing - the Missing Weapon in the Fight Against COVID-19 in South Africa

8 July 2020

analysis By Eftyhia Vardas, Cathy Van Rooyen, Jean Maritz, Marieke Brauer, Louis Marcus and Inéz Rossouw

The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and Covid-19 disease have challenged humanity in many ways. It has also changed the health profession. One example is how laboratory professionals, clinicians, scientists and technical staff moved from their usual role of providing ancillary information to primary clinicians and public health experts to centre stage. This is because laboratory tests are essential for the control of this pandemic, contributing to case identification, isolation, contact tracing, and rationalisation of infection control measures.

Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAAT) are currently the gold standard for the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Within weeks of the first cases in Wuhan, NAAT tests - specifically real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests - were developed by laboratories of the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as the China and US centres for disease control (CDC) public health agencies.

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