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Do the Covid-19 antibody and PCR tests screen for all mutations/types of the Covid coronavirus? With the predisposition for mutations, do you think a new vaccine will need to be created yearly for Covid-19?
The current PCR tests are made against multiple genes in the virus so single mutations shouldn’t effect the results. New virus isolates are being sequenced all the time and checked against the tests to make sure they all still work. The virus mutates quite slow and the primers used in the PCR tests are all in very conserved regions, so that it is likely that the PCR tests will work for a long time during this outbreak. The antibody tests are against the Spike protein which is mutating very slow as well. The tests use the whole Spike protein to see if the person has antibodies to it, so a few mutations in the Spike protein won’t effect the antibody tests.
For the vaccine, we will have to wait and see how the virus changes over time. But the vaccines are made against the whole protein and thus a few mutations shouldn’t effect much, however this is something that scientists are following and will follow for the future.
