Germany's Health Minister (Spahn, CDU) had a press conference this morning. Several things said:
1. He admits a number of Covid test kits on the market....are crap. He lays part of the blame on the EU (they certified them early on, without much testing). One of the German government agents is delegated now to test and put a German stamp of approval on the kits.
One story I essayed last week....suggested out of the 120 commercial brand kits sold in Germany....one out of five are crap.
2. He admits that there needs to be a antibodies test to determine when recovered....how you stand on your numbers. He also says that a antibodies test probably needs to be done after you've been vax'ed up.
Where this will lead to? I would imagine somewhere in the 30 to 60 days after you had Covid....you will get a call from the district health office or your doctor, and have some test done.
The idea that you might have to do this every other month? Well....it's anyone's guess, but logic would dictate that various people are different, and we might discover along this path that some people (even 15 months after a bout of Covid) still have a reasonable amount of antibodies. Sadly, we might also find out that certain vax'ed up people have lost half their antibodies after 60 days.
It's not a bad idea to test on the antibodies, but you might get results on the test that would stir up your frustrations. I'd be on the negative side if after a booster shot....my antibody score was only one-third effective by the 90th day after the booster.
3. Booster chatter? It would appear shortly after the Christmas holidays....some massive booster program will start up with just about all adults from the spring-summer period given another booster. Logically? You can interpret this to mean the original vaccination gives you six to eight months of coverage.
4. Direct quote: "Pretty much everyone will be vaccinated, recovered or died this winter. That is very likely with the Delta variant."
Odds of this? Unknown. No one even has the statistical information to say how many non-vax people exists in Germany, who've not had Covid in the past 20 months. It might be fewer than a thousand....it might be over two-million.
The topic of people who have been antibody-tested positive but shown no real symptoms? This occasionally comes up, and one Mainz University study suggested somewhere in the range of 15-to-20 percent of the Covid-tested-positive folks are matched by the no symptom-but positive crowd.
So I'll end this with a reflection....an awful lot of this chatter today....should have come up twelve months ago. The antibody test....the poor crappy test kits on the market, etc....all should have been a topic on the table of discussion.
Info from press conference: Focus.
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