Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans the Government has to roll out covid-19 antibody testing throughout the UK.

We are already offering antibody tests to National Health Service and care staff in England, with patients and social care residents eligible at their clinician’s request. We are also using antibody tests to support research studies.

In order to better understand the role that an antibody test could play in our response to the pandemic, we need to improve our understanding of how the immune system responds to the virus that causes COVID-19. We do not currently know how long an antibody response to the virus lasts, nor whether having antibodies means a person cannot transmit the virus to others. Our understanding of the virus will grow as new scientific evidence and studies emerge. To date, over 1.6 million COVID-19 antibody tests have been carried out.