Fauci Warns Antibody Tests 'Still Have a Way to Go'

Government officials and health experts have pointed to using antibody tests as a way to safely reopen communities.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state will begin conducting antibody tests today to help determine how many residents were infected by the coronavirus. 

But Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC's Good Morning America on Monday that more research is needed in order to determine whether someone who had the coronavirus is really immune to the disease.

"There’s an assumption — a reasonable assumption — that when you have an antibody, that you are protected against reinfection, but that has not been proven for this particular virus. It’s true for other viruses," Fauci told George Stephanopoulos. “But we don’t know how long that protection, if it exists, lasts. Is it one month? Three months? Six months? A year? So the assumption that with the tests that are out there, if you have an antibody positivity, you’re good to go — unless that test has been validated and you can show there’s a correlation between the antibody and protection, it is an assumption to say that this is something that we can work with.”

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said, “We still have a way to go" with antibody tests.

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