“Testing for antibodies seems to have gone by the wayside.
Actually immunological science has been ignored throughout this whole Covid debacle.”
Yes and no. The easiest to find antibodies also disappear quicker. There are several layers to our immunity. And it soon becomes almost impossible to find any antibodies, which is fine. Their job is over, so most of them go away.
Some do stick around for years, but they require highly specialized equipment $$$ to find, and long test protocols $$$.
But our memory cells store the info and can rapidly ramp back up production when needed.
So there’s a certain window to find most of them, measured in weeks. After that it’s very time consuming and expensive to find traces.
Studies done 9 months after having Covid, 96% had robust anti-bodies and 4% had trace/ample amounts. The “T” cells also go into action quickly as well later on down the road.
However, variants (depending how much it changes) could vary from zero symptoms to cold like symptoms....but we just don’t know enough about the “variants”.
Yeah, IgG, IgM can wane.
What you’re saying indicates estimates of infected who were unaware are underestimates.
It went by the wayside because it is much less reliable than the swab test for showing whether someone is positive. That’s why people get the swab test. They don’t want to know whether they had it or not. They want to know if they have it now.