I took an antibody test – soon I will know if I’ve had coronavirus or not

As a journalist and lifelong know-it-all, Holly Baxter simply has to find out if she came down with the virus and didn’t even realise

The fact that in a few weeks or months this might mean being able to visit my family back in Europe makes it worth it (Getty)

This week, I decided to bite the bullet and get the coronavirus antibody test. It’s something that’s been available in New York for a few weeks now – mainly available at CityMD outlets, which are walk-in centres you can find across all five boroughs every couple of miles – but I’d been holding off after reading ominous tweets about standing in lines next to sick people who literally keeled over while waiting for other appointments. I was slightly worried that my trip into any urgent care centre would become a sort of coronavirus guarantee: if you don’t find out you’ve already had it, you definitely walk away with it. So I stayed ensconced in my apartment until a few other friends had offered themselves up as canaries down the mine; then, when they seemed to still be alive and kicking, I decided to get on with it and go down there myself.

My fiance wasn’t interested in attending with me, even though we were both pretty sick in February with a flu-like illness that featured that telltale dry cough everyone’s talking about. His view is that the results change nothing, because we don’t know whether antibodies confer full immunity yet, and so what’s the point? My view, as a journalist and a lifelong know-it-all, is that I want all of the information available to me, whether it’s useful right now or not. For one thing, if it comes up positive, I’ll know how my body responds to coronavirus; for another, when we do find out what those all-important antibodies mean, I’ll already have the results to work off.

Yes, if it’s positive, I will be ordering a custom-made ‘I survived the coronavirus pandemic in New York’ T-shirt from the nearest willing retailer