Week 4: Screening for SARS-CoV2 antibodies

Introduction

Knowing the proportion of people in a population that are immune to an infectious disease is really important – but why? One reason is that it can tell you something about how quickly an infection will spread or whether it will die out. Once a sufficient proportion of the population is immune to an infectious agent, then it will die out, or at least that strain of the pathogen will disappear, because there are insufficient susceptible individuals to maintain a chain of disease transmission.

You are going to look into the relationship between transmission rates, herd immunity and vaccination rates later in the course. But before then you are going to investigate the incidence of antibodies to SARS-CoV2 in the sample set provided in the ELISA: Epidemiology laboratory. This will provide the basis for later investigations.

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Transcript: Audio 1 Introduction to Week 4

DAVID MALE:

Measuring antibodies against a pathogen, is one way of estimating the level of immunity in a population. It can also tell you how many people have been infected. This data is really important for epidemiological studies and designing vaccination programmes. Lateral flow tests for antibodies are convenient as they can be done at home but they only detect whether antibodies to a pathogen are present or not. In comparison, ELISA done in a laboratory provides quantitative data on antibodies of different classes. The aim of the investigation this week is to estimate the level of immunity to COVID-19 in different groups in August 2021. Do women make more antibodies than men? Do young people make stronger antibody responses than older people – here is your chance to find out.

End transcript: Audio 1 Introduction to Week 4

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Audio 1 Introduction to Week 4

By the end of this week, you should be able to:

• outline the course of the COVID-19 epidemic and vaccination programme in the UK
• organise and carry out a laboratory-based investigation for antibodies against SARS-CoV2
• record your data and carry out some simple data analysis.