If it’s negative later on in the course of your infection, after symptoms resolve, you’re likely no longer infectious. If your rapid test is positive, you’ll definitely want to isolate yourself from others, Landon said. This relatively high threshold correlates with contagiousness, experts say. (Your vaccination status can influence this process, too, but more on that later.) They only appear positive when your body has a certain amount of virus, or viral load, which means they may not detect COVID cases that don’t reach that threshold.Īnd most importantly, Landon noted, rapid tests can be negative early in your infection even if you’re feeling symptoms because it may take a while before there’s enough virus for the test to pick up. Rapid COVID tests, also called antigen tests, work by detecting bits of proteins on the surface of the coronavirus. Here’s how rapid tests work and why you can get false negative results when you have COVID, particularly in the early stages of infection. (Keep in mind your symptoms could have a non-COVID cause, too - the flu is circulating.) Emily Landon, an infectious disease expert and associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine. It could happen because you were vaccinated, you missed the window when it would’ve turned positive, you collected your test sample incorrectly, or you need to test again in a few days, according to Dr. (Both were vaccinated.)īut just because your rapid test takes a while to turn positive - or doesn’t at all - it doesn’t mean you’re free of infection or that your test is a fraud. The same thing happened to his 9-year-old daughter. Her rapid tests, however, always came back negative. It happened to Georgia resident and economist Christopher Cunningham, 46, whose 16-year-old daughter had a positive result on a PCR test on Jan. But beware of the dreaded false negative. Rapid tests are a welcome addition because they can give results in minutes. While PCR tests are still the gold standard, they can take a few days to a week or more to produce results as understaffed labs struggle to keep up with demand. You can order free rapid tests from the government here.) (And by available, I mean there are more of them, but you can’t always find them at your local store. At the same time, millions more at-home rapid tests are becoming available. It’s a confusing experience shared by many as the highly transmissible Omicron variant continues to spread in the US. Yet, several rapid tests kept telling me I was COVID-free. Last month I had strep throat–level pain while living with two people who were confirmed COVID positive.
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