Why We Need a Personalized Approach to COVID-19 Immunity Testing?

To date, the battle against COVID-19 has been waged largely in the field of public health, using a series of binary, black-and-white thresholds to measure progress. The number of positive cases per 100,000 people, yes/no results on PCR tests, absence or presence of antibodies – these have set the benchmarks used to determine when we can open our schools and restaurants, remove our masks and resume something resembling our old routines.

While these numbers do tell us something about the relative immunity of the population writ large, they don’t tell us anything about our own, personal immune profiles. If we really want to get “back to normal” with confidence, we are going to need a higher degree of personalized health data and more nuance used to interpret it.

By now, we have all witnessed countless examples of this individual uncertainty manifesting itself in a combination of best guess risks, uninformed bravado, and trepidatious returns to crowded restaurants, stores, and offices. Some still don’t trust that it’s safe to take off their masks or even leave their homes. Others, like Senator Rand Paul, are pointing to evidence of natural immunity following a previous infection with the virus. And many more are somewhere in between, weighing vague statistics like 95% or 66.3% vaccine effectiveness rates, reading the latest updates on local infection rates, and cautiously deciding whether it’s safe or not to see their friends again.