Shade Hotel Manhattan Beach hosts COVID-19 antibody tests
Dr. Chong Kim draws blood from Shade Hotel Director of Marketing Jenna Ritter to test for antibodies indicating exposure to the coronavirus. Photo by JP Cordero
In February, Manhattan Beach resident Carolyn Keller was in San Francisco with her 12-year-old son for a youth hockey tournament when her son developed a 103 degree fever. The fever lasted three days and it was three weeks before he was able to return to school. Keller and her other son also fell sick with high fevers.
In March, when COVID-19 became a household term, she wondered if she and her family had been exposed to the coronavirus, which causes the COVID-19 illness.
Wednesday morning at the Shade Hotel in Manhattan Beach, Keller had blood drawn for an antibody test in hopes of finding out if her family’s illnesses were COVID-19. Shade owner Michael Zislis had posted on social media that testing for COVID-19 would be offered at his hotel. The online sign-ups for the testing were limited to the first 100 people. Keller, who knew Zislis from Grand View School, which their children attended, was the first in line Wednesday morning.
Among the others lined up for testing in front of the hotel lobby was Kiss vocalist and rhythm guitarist Paul Stanley, who lives in Beverly Hills.
“This was worth traveling for. It’s something that should be much more readily available and kudos to Mike for doing this,” Stanley said.
Zislis said he came up with the idea for offering his hotel as a testing site because of the widespread demand for testing and the difficulty of getting testing, even for people with COVID-19 symptoms.
During Wednesday morning’s tests, he expressed the commonly held view that lack of testing “is a national disgrace.”
“My phone blew up when word went out that we were offering testing,” Zislis said.
Shade hotel owner Michael Zislis and Dr. Chong Kim. Photo bu JP Cordero
To conduct the test, Zislis enlisted Dr. Chong Kim, a concierge physician he knew from the doctor’s care of his hotel guests. The doctor agreed to do the tests for $200, $150 of which would go to lab fees.
The tests were not the costly nasal passage swab tests that determine if the COVID-19 virus is present. Instead, the tests were administered by drawing blood for the purpose of identifying the patient’s antibodies. The antibodies indicate if the body’s immune system has been confronted with the coronavirus.
According to a fact sheet given those who were tested Wednesday morning, a negative test would indicate “the person had not been exposed to COVID-19 virus.” Positive tests would indicate “the person is likely in the early stages of infection,” “middle stage of infection” or “last stage of infection,” “Or built an immunity.”
The fact sheet cautioned “there is evidence the immunity may not be lifelong.”
People tested Wednesday morning were told they would receive their results by email within 24 hours.
Keller said regardless of her test result, her response to the pandemic would not change. She and her family would continue to shelter at home.
Recent news results have raised doubts about the accuracy of the tests.
The World Health Organization recently recommended against using antibody tests for clinical decision making, the non profit newsroom ProPublica reported on Friday.
“What level of antibodies are needed to mean someone is protected? And if you are protected, how long are you protected? The answers to these questions are still unknown,” the article said, citing as its source Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, medical director of the Clinical Virology Laboratory for Stanford Health Care.
NPR reported Tuesday that more than 90 antibody tests are on the market, but only one has been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. It quoted FDA chief Stephen Hahn as saying, the other tests “may not be as accurate as we’d like.”
On Wednesday, at her daily press conference update on the coronavirus, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the director of the LA County Public Health Department, said the County last weekend conducted a random sample serology test of 1,000 adults. She said such tests would continue every three weeks throughout the summer, and include smaller, targeted serology tests of health care works and first responders.
But she said, “This is a very different form of test from the one people use to determine if they are positive or negative for COVID-19. These antibody tests do not detect the virus and they don’t diagnose if somebody is positive for COVID-19. What it does is measure antibodies and this allows us to know whether a person’s body has already mounted a response to the virus.”
Dr. Michael Mellman, an internist whose practice is in El Segundo, expressed concern about the reliability of the tests. He said none of the three testing labs he and local hospitals use — Quest, LabCorp and West Pacific — offer antibody tests for COVID-19.
“We do not know the false positive or negative rates of antibody tests. So, there is no way anyone knows what a positive or negative test means at this early stage of testing with antibody tests.
“Also, the antibody test does not reveal anything about whether or not the tested person is still shedding the virus. That is an entirely different test.” ER