Hi and welcome.  The short answer is no.  The blood tests look for
the antibodies to herpes, not the virus itself, and it still takes
the body a certain amount of time to manufacture the antibodies
after the initial herpes infection.  Whether, upon becoming
infected, a person has an overt outbreak or not doesn't matter.  The
*body* knows it has been infected even if the person doesn't, and
the body begins manufacturing antibodies as soon as it needs to.
And while it can take 12-16 weeks for the blood tests to detect the
antibodies, the body is very often faster than that, but if you get
a negative blood test before 16 weeks, you might want to have a
second one later.

Hope that helps.  Take care,

Mike

Nope.
Or at least sorta nope.
Actually, some people are able to develop detectable antibodies much
more quickly than others, a few people can generate them in just a few
weeks. Most people can generate them in 3-4 months though and since
there's no way of knowing who can and who can't develop antibodies the
quickest, testing earlier than 3-4 months will undoubtedly result in
false negatives for the slow pokes. I think what you're asking though
is, shouldn't detectable antibodies be generated as quickly as an
outbreak? And that's where the nope comes in. Especially if you have
an outbreak two days after you're infected, whether it's obvious or
not, the antibodies won't be in your blood stream that quickly.
However, and you may know this already, an immediate (2 days) outbreak
can be diagnosed by means of viral culture. Of course you would have
to be aware of the outbreak to do that.
M2

You don't have to have an outbreak in order to test positive for herpes. 90%
of people that have genital herpes don't even know that they have it, etc.
What people need to do in order to find out if they have herpes is to have a
herpes type-1 and type-2 antibody testing using type specific serology. That
should do the trick!

Angela
www.yoshi2me.com