LINCOLN - If you are hoping antibody testing for COVID-19 might be the solution to getting back to normal until there's a vaccine, you're likely to be disappointed.

Dr. Jim Nora, medical director of infection prevention at Bryan Medical Center, said Thursday that antibody tests for the illness are still too unreliable. "COVID-19 serology testing does not work well," Nora said, especially as a diagnostic tool. He said the immune response to the virus is complex and not well understood. For example, many people with COVID-19 are thought to be asymptomatic, Nora said, and those people often don't have a strong immune response to the virus and may produce few or no antibodies. It also takes 10-14 days for those infected with COVID-19 to create antibodies, so if they are tested too early, the test will produce a false negative, he said.

These, among other factors, make the tests unreliable.

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