A STUDY TO that will test Irish people for coronavirus antibodies is planned for June, health officials said today.

Dr Cillian de Gascun, Director of the National Virus Reference Laboratory (NVRL) said the test is currently being evaluated and a proposal will then go forward for ethical approval.

“If that’s approved – that should happen at the end of this month – we certainly plan to start the study in June,” he said at the Department of Health briefing this evening. 

So a proportion – a small proportion – of the population would be in essence chosen at random, hopefully it will be representative of the population at large. And then they will be invited forward to have blood taken, and that will be tested for antibody to Sars Covid-2 (the strain of coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 disease).

It would obviously be gender, ethnicity, age matched to the population as a whole. We’d probably look at two different regions – one of a high prevalence and one of a low prevalence. And then, depending on the findings of that first iteration, it will probably be repeated at serial intervals, perhaps in different geographic areas depending on the findings of the first iteration.

He said the initial plan is to “get an overall picture of what’s happening in the population at large”.

However he said there’s no reason why later studies could not focus on particular work sectors.

“I think we want to get a baseline first if you like, across the general population. And then when we have a baseline then we can target specific sectors to see if that if that particular groups have a higher seroprevalence than others,” he said.

To date, more than 295,000 tests for the virus have been carried out in Ireland. Over the past week, 36,818 test were carried out in laboratories and of these, 932 were positive, giving a positivity rate of 2.5%.