Antibodies to COVID-19 in New York Health Care Workers

A New York resident, Elliott Bennett-Guerrero graduated from Harvard Medical School and received training in cardiac anesthesiology and critical care medicine from Duke University Medical Center. Currently, Elliott Bennett-Guerrero serves as a professor and vice chairman at Stony Brook Medicine’s department of anesthesiology.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, he led a study on the antibody response to the virus in health care workers. His research team used a blood test, which can detect IgM and IgG antibodies that are present in blood samples. The IgM and IgG antibodies that can be detected are made by the body as an immune response against the virus. The study involved 474 health care workers at Stony Brook Hospital. They found that the prevalence of antibodies in the health care workers was similar to what had been reported at that time for the general population of New York State (14%). They concluded that health care workers with higher exposure rates were not more likely to have been infected with COVID-19 than people in the general population. The study was published in the journal Perioperative Medicine (Prevalence of IgM and IgG antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in health care workers at a tertiary care New York hospital during the Spring COVID-19 surge. Perioper Med (Lond). 2021 Mar 2;10(1):7. PMID: 33648573).