Chester County will be the first in Pennsylvania to start antibody testing for COVID-19, its leaders announced Monday.

A post on the county's website reports Chester County Commissioners’ Chair Marian Moskowitz said it has received a shipment of 10,000 pin-prick blood test kits and is expecting a second shipment of 10,000 week.

"These kits will be administered to priority individuals - emergency responders, healthcare workers and staff at long-term care facilities throughout Chester County, to determine those who have developed coronavirus antibodies, with or without symptoms,” said Moskowitz.

In addition, the post said, staff and inmates at Chester County Prison will be tested "to help determine work prioritization for prison staff, as well as identify a better system to group inmates that will help better prevent further spread of the virus within the prison."

The test were purchased from Advaite, a Chester County-based company, results will be available in 15 minutes and administering them will not require the kind of personal protective equipment that health care workers need, according to the post.

In a statement,Chester County Health Department Director Jeanne Casner said the antibody test will not replace confirming tests.

"Knowledge of who has developed antibodies to the virus can help us tremendously in our strategy to respond to emergencies, treat patients and care for the elderly,” Casner said.

The kits cost $29.50 each, a total of $590,000 that the county said it will cover.

Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said Monday that U.S. regulators only recently authorized the first antibody test kits.

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The department anticipates they will be useful once they do become readily available, she said, and will be working on how to implement them at that point. But, she said, it has no plans right now to offer anything like immunity certificates that have been proposed in some other countries.

"There’s much more to learn about covid-19 and what exactly these tests mean," she said, noting that antibody tests are not used to show if someone is currently infected and contagious.

The state health department has consistently declined to release detailed information on COVID-19 cases for Lancaster County and other parts of the state that do not have county or municipal health departments, citing privacy concerns.

But for places like Chester County that do have their own departments, it allows them to release what details they see fit, and Chester County has an online dashboard that shows how many cases have been confirmed in each municipality and the age ranges of the people affected.

Asked Monday about releasing municipal information, Levine said the department has gotten a lot of requests from county and emergency services officials and state police about how it shares data, is "actively in discussion about that" and hoping to have a solution this week that "balances all of the needs."