Khalid Simply Says

 Congratulations. You have taken a step towards being protected and towards the threshold of living without the fear of Covid-19 affliction. But you are not there yet.   An elder of my family recently wrote to me stating that he had himself tested for antibodies to the coronavirus a month after having been fully vaccinated. The result came back as disappointingly low level of antibodies.   So he asked: What am I supposed to do now?   Nothing different that you have been doing all along, I said.  The same standard operating principals: Maintain social distance, cover face and nose and hand hygiene. Since you don’t have a strong level of antibodies, you are not fully protected. Antibody testing after vaccination is not recommended by the CDC at this time.   He was not happy to hear this but recognized that Covid-19 being a new infection and a pandemic, there was no one straight answer.   No single action offers 100% protection, whereas the outc...

  Millions of doses of different Covid vaccines are now available. Which one should one get, is the question? My answer: Whichever is available in your community. All of them are effective, although none is 100% effective. It is however certain that vaccines will reduce the severity of the infection even if they cannot fully protect us against the virus. Does everyone develop immunity after vaccination? We hope so. It depends on many factors. Individuals with less robust immune system due to factors such as age, underlying health conditions and current medications, may not develop enough protection. Some vaccines may have degraded during storage and transportation. We must be kept in mind of reports of fake vaccines that are being sold in some countries. The race to develop and produce large quantities of vaccines against the coronavirus is on. Whereas many countries have developed vaccines and are on their way to vaccinate their respective citizens, billions of the people in the...

A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) helps us interpret the tests done in Covid-19 illness.   Thus far, the most reliable test for the diagnosis of Covid-19 illness has been the RT-PCR test of the nasal cavity secretions taken with a swab. This test can also be performed on swabs taken from the throat, the saliva, the sputum and even from stools. However, the results of secretions from the nasal cavity are most accurate and reliable. RT-PCR (reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction) is a genomic test that looks for the membrane or the nuclear proteins of the virus. To identify the presence of the virus from the tiny amount of the viral proteins picked up on the swab, the machine in the laboratory amplifies the genomic content by 20-60 or even 100-fold. Of course, if the viral load (the amount of virus and viral proteins) on the swab is high, then less amplification is needed for the RT-PCR test and vice versa. The journal...