As many as 50% of those in the United States testing positive for COVID-19 in the coming weeks may find out via an at-home test, researchers say. That creates challenges for tracking case counts.
It got blurrier from there. Since I tested myself at home, my COVID-19 test wasn’t official. Surely I should report my positive test; after all, public health regulations are often based on case numbers. But it turns out that playing my part was a lot harder than I would have thought. To make my case count, I donned two KN95 masks and walked to the COVID-19 testing booth on my street to get a PCR test that would be officially reported. The downside is that I was contagious so there was a risk of exposing others to the virus, though I was masked for all but the swab. An alternative, Gertz suggests, is reporting your positive at-home test to a primary care provider. Some at-home test manufacturers also provide information about how to report results from that test.
Speaking of precautions, according to the isolation guidelines put out by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I could have returned to the world without a mask on the 10th day after my symptoms started. But I learned from Mina that you can still be contagious after 10 days. So how do I know if I can still infect others?
“This isn’t like a small fraction of people who are still positive and infectious at five days,” Mina says. One possible explanation for these observations is that people who are vaccinated or have been previously infected have a quicker immune system response to the virus. So initial symptoms are caused by your immune response, not a high viral load, which comes later. “I would highly, highly, highly recommend people not listen to the five-day-to-exit-isolation recommendation,” Mina says.
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