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I Want To Expand My Social Bubble. Should I Get A Coronavirus Test First?

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Let’s face it, if you’ve been staying home a lot, you’re probably pretty tired of looking at the same faces. Love them …
Let’s face it, if you’ve been staying home a lot, you’re probably pretty tired of looking at the same faces. Love them as we do, it feels like well past time to start seeing other people, to visit or host relatives and dear friends. So how can you do this without unknowingly spreading the virus or getting exposed? Recently my husband and I debated this when our son, who lives in another state, said he’d like to come home for a visit. He lives with roommates in a city with a high rate of infection and he works in a restaurant. We thought of having him get a diagnostic test to find out if he is currently infected. That way, if he got back a negative test, our problems would be solved, right? Well when I called up a few infectious disease specialists to ask if this all made sense I discovered that using a diagnostic test for the coronavirus this way can be problematic. Here’s what I learned. First, which test are we talking about? Currently the most commonly available test that can detect an active infection is the molecular or PCR test, typically collected via a swab in the nose or the back of the throat. These tests look for the virus’s genetic material — and are highly sensitive. Another kind of diagnostic test is an antigen test which can detect the coronavirus‘ proteins — these are less sensitive, says Daniel Green, a pathologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and can be less accurate. And finally there are tests which show if your body has developed antibodies because it fought an infection from the coronavirus. Those tell you about an infection you had in the past, not what you have right now. If I get a negative result on a PCR diagnostic test, can I be certain I won’t infect someone I want to spend time with? Like everything with this pandemic, the answer is complicated. The infectious disease experts I spoke to told me there are two reasons why testing might not be very helpful. The first has to do with the length of time it takes to get your test results back these days — up to a week or more in some places for PCR tests. By the time you get your results back, you could have unknowingly been exposed to the virus making the original test irrelevant. The next big reason has to do with accuracy. While the PCR test is highly accurate in a laboratory setting, out in the real world it can produce some false positives and a lot of false negatives. In fact studies show a negative diagnostic test result can be wrong between 5% and 40% of the time, depending on the circumstances. Some of this variation has to do with how well the sample was collected — whether an adequate amount of mucous made it onto the swab for example. But it also has to do with timing. You see, the diagnostic test, tells you whether or not you have the virus on the day you took it.

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