Body Lounge Park Cities Offers COVID-19 Antibody Tests, Has Waitlist For New Tests
Body Lounge Park Cities, after offering COVID-19 antibody tests recently, is waiting for a new shipment.
The tests are from California-based Confirm Biosciences, according to Body Lounge Park Cities’ website.
“My medical director, Dr. Katina Thornton… she reached out to Stanford to see if they needed additional test sites, and they did, and so that’s how we came about doing testing (the week of April 13),” Dr. Ed Le Cara of Body Lounge Park Cities said. “There’s two different antibodies that we’re testing for – one is an acute antibody, meaning you’ve been exposed probably within the last two weeks, and then there is a second, which would be more of a chronic… exposure, meaning that… probably between two and six weeks, you were exposed to an extent where your body had to fight off the infection, so you developed an antibody.”
The test itself is $50 and administered by testing a drop of blood for the antibodies that are an immunologic response to COVID-19, Le Cara said.
Le Cara said the clinic administered about 200 tests the first week before running out of tests. He said the first were limited to those who thought they were exposed or who experienced symptoms consistent with COVID-19. The boutique wellness clinic at 6805 Hillcrest Avenue has a waitlist for those interested in being tested to sign up online while the lounge waits to receive the next round of tests.
“We’ll probably open it up to whoever wants to know whether they’ve been exposed or not. We have about 800 people on the waiting list (as of April 21)… so I think we would prefer people that think they’ve been exposed or had symptoms, probably after Jan. 1… I think, at this point, with us trying to get back to work and kind of open up the country, I think anybody that wanted to be tested, we would allow,” he said.
Le Cara added that they recommend those who receive a positive result get the test for active COVID-19 infection.
He said most of the tests they’ve done have been people in the immediate area.
“The other thing we found from our testing was the people that came up positive typically had traveled to either Colorado after January or they had traveled to Florida, so if they did travel to those areas for spring break or maybe during Christmas, their likelihood of exposure was probably higher,” Le Cara said. “As we get more and more information and we’re able to combine this with the Stanford study…getting as much data as possible, we’ll have more information for folks about what it actually means to be positive or negative.”
He said all test results go to Stanford and positive tests go to Dallas County officials.
