Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has plans to carry out covid-19 antibody testing of residents residing in particular regions to ascertain whether those regions could be brought out of lockdown earlier than other regions.

In order to better understand the role that an antibody test could play in enabling as many individuals as possible to safely return to their normal lives, we first need to improve our understanding of how the immune system responds to COVID-19.

COVID-19 is a new disease and the science around immunity to the virus remains uncertain. We do not know, for example, how long an antibody response to the virus lasts nor whether having antibodies means one does not transmit the virus to others.

These are the critical questions we first need to address before considering how/whether antibody testing could be used to ease social distancing measures.