A lot of us are thinking about how to celebrate the holidays while feeling a little more Covid-19-safe this year. Testing is one tool for that, and here’s a little how-to video on using an at-home rapid test.
Below is a partial transcript of an interview in the video with Dr. Benjamin Lee, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at UVM Medical Center, edited for length and clarity.
Dr. Benjamin Lee: The biggest differences are that more of the at-home tests tend to be what we call antigen tests, so those tests are looking for bits of viral protein. Whereas the state-run tests are typically going to be PCR tests, and PCR tests are looking for tiny little pieces of the genetic code of the virus that can then be amplified.
And that difference means that PCR tests are going to be more sensitive than antigen tests. The PCR tests can detect much lower quantities of virus, so that’s one important difference.
The other important difference is that, with any test, there’s always the risk of operator error.
That being said, most of the available at-home tests are pretty straightforward to use.
Part of the challenge is that everybody has to have a willingness to accept the result.
A positive take-home test should be treated as a true positive. And that would mean isolating for 10 days from the onset of symptoms, or from the positive test results. And letting close contacts know that we’ve had this positive result.
There isn’t any single test result or strategy that’s going to guarantee that there’s no risk for infection. And so I think that it’s important that people recognize that, even with the addition of testing, what we can do is lower the risk, but not eliminate the risk.
If people incorporate at-home testing, they should, if possible, try to do more than one test, meaning testing on multiple days, with all of those tests being as close as possible to the gathering.
However, a negative result for everybody doesn’t mean that there’s going to be zero risk — it just means that the risk is likely lower. And people should still think about other mitigation measures that they might want to incorporate into their gathering.
So there’s always going to be a little bit of risk that the antigen test just didn’t catch the exact right moment in time in which a positive individual could have been detected.
If you have not yet been vaccinated and are eligible to do so, get vaccinated. That is probably by far the best way we can reduce our risk of going into these winter months. And that includes getting your booster shot if you are eligible.
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