While medical experts agree that many viral tests are currently able to detect the new COVID-19 variants, antibody tests are not. ICAP’s senior technical director, Jessica Justman, MD, was quoted by ABC News Online explaining the limitations of the testing technology:

“The antibody tests, at this stage, certainly are not able to determine or distinguish variation in Sars-cov-2 strains,” said Dr. Jessica Justman, an associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “So, you can’t get an antibody test and say ‘I have an antibody to the new variant.’ We just don’t have that kind of test yet.”