Health

Framingham lab ‘confident’ in antibody testing results

BOSTON — Kathryn Short is convinced her husband had COVID-19.

“He came back [from a conference in January] and was super, super sick,” the Boston College graduate and Minnesota resident said.

Short said her husband showed all the classic symptoms for COVID 19—cough, fever and respiratory issues—so they signed up to take an antibody test from a local lab near their home in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“We were obviously very disappointed because we thought we were maybe out of the woods,” Short said.

Short is worried because she’s expecting a baby in July. She had hoped to pass antibodies onto her child. But, like so many, Short is also learning how accurate—or inaccurate—the antibody tests may be.

“They had kind of a disclaimer on the website for this lab that’s like, ‘There are false negatives,’ and ‘This hasn’t been FDA approved,’” Short said.

Gov. Baker slammed antibody testing Monday, calling them inaccurate up to a third of the time.

“I worry a lot of people are going to draw conclusions from these results that [one], may not be accurate, and [two], my not be appropriate conclusions to draw from,” Baker said during a news conference.

Still, more and more people are turning to the tests to find out if they may be immune to COVID-19.

“Folks want to know if they have the antibody,” said David Morgan, Head of Transplant & Infectious Disease at Eurofins U.S.

Eurofins owns Boston Heart Diagnostics, a testing facility in Framingham that offers antibody tests.

Morgan said his company is conducting 10,000 antibody tests a day.

“We’re very confident in our results,” he said.

But Dr. Richard Ellison, a professor who specializes in infectious diseases at UMass Memorial Medical Center, said COVID-19 is related to other viruses that can cause the common cold.

“If someone had a call last fall and it could have been due to coronavirus and they could have developed antibodies to that,” Dr. Ellison said.

“Now you do a test and you find out they’re positive, but the real question is are they positive to the common cold virus they had before or are they positive to the COVID 19?” he asked.

According to Boston Heart Diagnostics, their antibody test is about 95% positive in patients who tested positive for COVID-19.

A company spokesperson said the antibodies related to COVID-19—IgA, IgG, and IgM—show up in about 15 percent of more than 4,000 people tested.

“I think the Governor [Baker] has good reason to be worried about false positives or false negatives for that matter," Morgan said. “The only way to combat that is to make sure you go into a high complexity laboratory with a high sensitive method that we’re using.”

Download the free Boston 25 News app for up-to-the-minute push alerts

>> Complete local and national coronavirus coverage here


RESOURCES:

- Massachusetts Coronavirus Information

- Boston Coronavirus Information

- Follow us on Facebook and Twitter | Watch Boston 25 NOW

- Download our free apps for your phone and smart TV