Many of us rely on rapid Covid tests to decide whether we’re infected before we leave the house to go to work on visit a friend.
These home tests are terrific, but they have one major limitation: They often produce negative results early-on in the course of illness.
“So, if you wake up in the morning and you’ve got symptoms that sound just like Covid, or maybe just like a cold – and you test negative – that doesn’t mean you don’t have Covid,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an expert on infectious diseases at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “You should assume you do [have Covid] and retest the next day, and if that’s negative, even retest the following day. Because we’re seeing a lot of people who early-on in the illness for the first few days may test negative with that rapid test.”
If you have symptoms, but the test results are negative, you should assume you are contagious, and act accordingly, Dr. Swartzberg advised.
“We know that the rapid test correlates pretty well with the amount of virus you have, and we think that if the rapid test is negative, you may not have enough virus to infect somebody else –but you can’t be confident of that,” Dr. Swartzberg said.
“On the other hand, if you test positive…you have Covid,” he said. “The test is rarely falsely positive.”
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