How to get free or low-cost Covid tests this holiday season — and how best to use them.
PCR tests are generally more sensitive and accurate than at-home tests, but the results can take at least 24 hours — and often several days. At-home tests , meanwhile, rarely give a false positive but can give false negatives, even if someone is symptomatic. That's especially likely in the early days of an infection.
For other people, Covid tests never come back positive even though they feel sick and were exposed to the virus. It's possible that these people have an unrelated infection, or their immune systems did a swift job of vanquishing the virus before it replicated widely enough to register on a test. "You don't want to wait two days, get a positive and realize you should have been treating for two days," he said.Campbell said testing positive on an at-home test is a pretty good indicator that you're infectious. But Butler-Wu cautioned that it’s still possible to be contagious and test negative on an at-home test, or to test positive and not spread the virus to others.
It is well established, however, that people are more likely to be infectious at the start of their illness. An
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