[Renaud]

But he still has a point.

Pushing all manners of unreliable tests will makes matters worse for everyone.

Any test will need a very high degree of reliability or you’ll end up with large numbers of people being quarantined for nothing or, worse, large numbers of people with the virus allowed to roam free as they believe they are not carrying it.

[Spartan-S63]

The other issue is that we don't know what concentration of antibodies is required for immunity. We know these things for other diseases, like influenza, chickenpox, etc. We have no point of reference, so we can only test for the presence of antibodies.

I think antibody tests are still likely to be useful, especially in collecting data on the pervasiveness of the disease and getting information to find out what threshold immunity occurs at. The messaging around them is rife for misuse, though.

Everyone is looking for a silver bullet, but all we can do right now is the long, slog of science to get to a place where it's truly safe to try to return to a semblance of normalcy.

[Gibbon1]

Worse is people thinking they are immune based on a false positive and then engaging risky behavior.