Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV
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You can pick an actual infectious disease specialist to say whatever you want, but looking at that article, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
The TLDR is something like:
- If you have cold symptoms it's probably covid
- You need to isolate if you have cold symptoms whether you tested or not
- The test makes no difference to your isolation protocol and a negative test won't end your isolation early in most cases (except for healthcare workers who can maybe go back early?). If you get a negative antigen test you should go get a PCR test.
- "You can continue to test positive for COVID-19 on a PCR test for months, even though you’re no longer sick or infectious"
If the test makes practically no difference to the outcome, what is the point of it? And why would we recommend everybody try to test when they're isolating anyway and test capacity is strained in most places? I guess it's possible Chicago has tons of capacity so the advice makes sense there but not here where people were lining up for 4 hours in some cases and in some cases taking public transit to get to the test site.
As the CDC is loosening the recommended isolation protocols, my guess is many places will back off on testing (and contact tracing) and we will gradually move back to previous norms we followed for endemic illnesses that aren't all that threatening to most people. The test/trace/isolate strategy is for relatively high severity contagions with relatively low prevalence, the opposite of omicron.