Testing began Friday for a trial to detect COVID-19 antibodies in the blood of 1,000 L.A. County residents. The study is a collaborative effort between the USC Price School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, and the first of its kind in the United States.
The trial was conducted at six locations around LA County in a drive-through blood test. Results take ten minutes and could indicate possible immunity to the coronavirus. This may also determine who is able to reenter the workforce, which has been devastated by numerous layoffs and furloughs. In the past week, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment.
The trial could also model the mortality rate of COVID-19, and how the disease spreads.
Testing will be repeated every two weeks, with pilot testing taking place April 10 and 11. Subjects are randomly selected, and there are no walk-ins allowed.
This comes amid questions surrounding California’s immunity to the disease, of which there could be several factors. California, for example is over twice as populous as New York, which has more infections than any country outside the US, but it is also about triple the size. According to the CDC, New York State currently has over 5.5 times as many confirmed COVID-19 cases as California.
According to Dr. Neeraj Sood, a USC professor who is one of this study’s principal investigators, the test will provide crucial data to understanding how many people have actually been infected by COVID-19. The 1,000 people selected were representative of LA County’s population by age, gender and ethnicity.
“We will know today how many people in Los Angeles County ever had COVID. Then we will know three weeks later how many new infections we’ve had, and what happened to the prevalence of COVID in the population,” said Sood. “So if we track that over time, we can predict when the epidemic will end.”
As tests will be repeated every few weeks, following these results closely is vital to creating a model of what the future of COVID-19 will be.
“The number of people who have the coronavirus– we only know a sliver of them. There are a number of people who have symptoms and never got tested, or who are asymptomatic and have recovered,” said Sood, who is also the Vice Dean of Research at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.
The impact of this trial isn’t all about modeling, however. Many Californians are following the data around COVID-19 closely so they can get a better picture of what their future looks like.
“When we get the data back, if we see that a lot of people have been infected and possess the antibody, this is going to be very informative for policy workers, because we’re going to have to get folks back into the economy,” said Kevin de León, who helped facilitate this trial and is also the senior fellow of climate change, environmental justice and public health at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute.
For those who have been laid off or are unable to work, the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t just an inconvenience– it’s a sea change that could threaten their lives. León, who is also the California Senate President pro Tempore Emeritus, believes that this outbreak has hit people of color, immigrants and undocumented workers particularly hard economically– which makes it even more important that they can get back to work.
“This is going to be really critical, because a vaccine or a cure is not happening in the immediate future. It may be 15 months, 18 months, two years,” said León. “We can’t leave that up to chance, or fate. That’s why doing these tests are absolutely critical.”