Curious to Know If You’ve Already Had Coronavirus? Antibody Testing Coming to Idaho

Were you wicked sick with a cold unlike anything you'd ever experienced at the beginning of 2020? Could it have been coronavirus? Thanks to Crush the Curve Idaho, you'll soon have access to a test that brings a little closer to the answer to that question.

Beginning, Monday April 20 a COVID-19 antibody test will be available to anybody through one of Crush the Curve's Meridian testing sites. Once you take your online assessment through their website, it will give you directions on your next steps. The reliable test will help find people who've had this particular strain of coronavirus and pulled through it and those who were asymptomatic carriers. According to KTVB, the antibody test that Crush the Curve is 96.7% accurate and gets results back to you in 24-48 hours.

The antibody test is a blood that looks for the presence of COVID-19 antibodies in your bloodstream. Crush the Curve founder, Tommy Alquist M.D., tells Idaho News 6 that Dr. Anthony Fauci's team is using tests like these to determine if people become immune to this strain of coronavirus after having it. They're also exploring if those antibodies would make a recovered patient immune for life or if that immunity diminishes over time.

The non-profit is still determining a fee for the tests but are trying to make them affordable for Idahoans so we can get ourselves a little closer to resuming business as usual. They plan to work with insurance companies, too.

Would you be interested in getting this test done? I'm really considering it for myself. While visiting family over the holidays I came down with a sore throat and horrible congestion out of nowhere. I'm not sure where my dad keeps the thermometer at his home, so I never took my temperature to see if I had a fever but I was waking up in a pool of sweat every morning. After getting back to Idaho, I was still really, really sick and doing the morning show on LITE-FM started to become a challenge. I found myself gasping for air and coughing between every segment of the show. Whatever this was would not go away. I also had travel to New York City a few weeks before getting sick, so...there's that.

I feel that if my antibody test came back positive, it would give me a little peace of mind knowing that I already beat COVID-19 once. At the same time, I'd feel terrible knowing that I came in to work with it every single day and exposed my co-workers to something that was potentially life-threatening.