DURHAM, N.C. – I got the antibody test Tuesday afternoon at Bull City Family Medicine and Pediatrics.

The test will determine if I've been exposed to the coronavirus.

"So usually if you get exposed to something that's foreign, your body has these cool cells called B-cells. They recognize it, and they turn into something that's called a positive cell, and they make antibodies," says Dr. James Partridge, who also serves as my doctor.

Partridge says, in general, antibodies form after a virus enters the system. Once you recover, those antibodies would attack the virus if it were to ever return.

"So if they find them, they can attack them and get them out of your system," he says.

Back at Bull City, technicians took a blood sample that will then go to LabCorp, one of the many companies that rolled out the test. Partridge says scientists will look for antibodies, which are also proteins. It can take up to three days to get results.

According to LabCorp, the test is maybe for people who had COVID-19 symptoms like loss of smell or taste, difficulty breathing, or weakness. A patient should not have had a fever in the past three days. I battled some of those symptoms back in January.

But there's disagreement within the medical community. Partridge says people shouldn't get the test simply because they suspect they had the coronavirus. He says there are too many unknowns right now.

"We don't know if you're immune. Is it going to come back next year? Are you protected? We don't even know how long those antibodies last. So all it will tell you is that you got exposed at some time in the past and that's about it," he says.

Partridge says more data is needed from people who have recovered from the coronavirus and have antibodies.

"It's going to probably be a time thing, you know. I would imagine that they'll get through this, people actually getting sick and they'll start looking at numbers," he adds.