Even though the fact that I felt perfectly fine made it all seem a bit surreal, Jeff and I decided to assume the test was right and to operate as if I really was infected, which meant staying at different ends of the apartment from each other. That is a terrifying prospect at this moment in the pandemic - as transmission, illness, and death rates from COVID-19 continue to ramp up exponentially.Īfter the call from Delaware, I put on my mask and made up the bed in the spare room, preparing for my 10 days of isolation inside our home, as the CDC recommends. In addition, every time I tried to understand more about my own situation, I ran into a stone wall of incomplete information. Shots - Health News Without Resources, Vaccine Rollout Could 'Fall At The Last Hurdle,' Journalist Warns I was curious to know on which side of that boundary my own test fell. If it used a Ct of 30 as a cutoff instead, the Times calculated, 63% of the people identified as positive would instead be told that no virus could be detected - in other words, they'd be told they did not have COVID-19. ![]() The Times analysis found, among other things, that the New York state laboratory uses a Ct of 40 to make a positive designation. And while there's no direct evidence that people with those high cycle numbers would be less sick than those with low numbers, there's good evidence that they would at least be less contagious. That could mean at least some of the people deemed positive for COVID-19 started off with minuscule amounts of virus. Shots - Health News What You Need To Know As The First COVID-19 Vaccine Heads Your WayĪccording to an analysis by The New York Times last summer, the labs that keep track of Ct numbers tend to report them at 37 to 40 - meaning they run a sample through 37 to 40 amplification cycles, if needed, before deciding whether to call it positive or negative. It can offer helpful information not only for epidemiologists but for individuals, too - those of us desperate to predict, as I suddenly was, the likely trajectory of our illness after a positive test result. Experts have been saying that the Ct (cycle threshold) number is crucial to understanding how the coronavirus spreads and how it causes disease. 9 after our weekend away.Īs a science journalist who's written about emerging viruses for 30 years, I knew enough to ask the Delaware public health rep whether the lab report included a Ct number. ![]() 11, so what was the point in doing so now? If I was going to expose him, surely the most dangerous period had been those four crucial days when I was supposedly shedding the coronavirus in the bed we shared, the sips of bourbon we exchanged, and the three-plus hours in the car together, windows closed, during our drive home to New York on Nov. That last bit surprised me - my husband and I certainly hadn't been isolating from one another between taking the test on Nov. Don't leave the apartment for any reason. The woman on the phone went down a list of the things I needed to do: Stay home. ![]() Short Wave What Coronavirus Test Results Do - And Don't - Mean
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