Interestingly, some private hospitals in the US have for years used radiologists in Australia (for example) to read X-rays at night.
Also, the VAMC’s cross state lines already to do Telehealth appointments. VAMCs require a state license, not the state license in which you are working. The state license is universally accepted because it is a government facility, not a state facility. So, it is already happening to some degree.
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I just first learned about this here yesterday and today a friend’s coworker is hospitalized with it after a mild Covid. He is in his 40th so it’s not just young people.
From WaPo: “They relied on rapid coronavirus tests to gather safely. Some wish they hadn’t.”
It’s a weird disease for sure! It’s so random as to who gets what manifestation. The good news is that encephalitis, at least thus far, appears to be rare. It doesn’t feel that way when someone near you is the rare one though.
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This WaPo article begins with the story of the family from NJ who uses the rapid tests repeatedly to test the son coming home from abroad, so he doesn’t infect the family and especially the 80 year old grandmother. It’s presented as though it’s a failure of the home rapid tests because eventually the son tests positive on a PCR. But the story says that the grandmother tests negative and no one shows any symptoms. It doesn’t even say that anyone else ever tested positive, even asymptomatically. Is this really a failure of the home rapid tests? Isn’t it likely that the test repeatedly did not pick up the son’s infection because he wasn’t very contagious?
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My kid got that on tetracycline, which can trigger lupus. The book “Brain on Fire” is about autoimmune encephalitis, I believe.
That seems to be consistent. Unfortunately, people generally do not seem to note the distinction between “infected” and “contagious”. Rapid tests may give false negatives for some infected people, but that is less likely if they are in the contagious stage.
PCR tests take too long to return results to be useful for precautionary or surveillance testing, unless the person in question is quarantining from a few days before the test to the event that the test is intended to be a precaution to.
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Free home tests from government is live now COVID Home Tests | USPS
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Quick question for the collective knowledge here: friend’s H went on a ski trip and came home with COVID. Felt pretty miserable but no hospitalization. 10 days later he’s feeling better but still testing positive on a home test. Could that mean he’s still contagious?
For rapid antigen tests:
- Positive → infected and probably contagious
- Negative → not infected, or infected but probably not contagious (but note that this state could occur in both the pre-contagious and post-contagious stage of infection)
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I’ve been told by people who work in hospitals that there are currently very few, if any, cases of flu. If someone has flu-like symptoms, they likely have COVID. If a test can only detect Omicron infection when the viral load is high enough to generate symptoms, shouldn’t the person with these symptoms just assume s/he has COVID? Wouldn’t it be better to do that than relying on a test which has a 10% chance of producing a false negative?
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It depends on whether you are testing to make medical decisions (in which case you want to know if you are infected) or for precautionary or surveillance purposes (in which case you want to know if you are contagious, and want to know now, not 2-3 days from now).
Note that rapid tests can detect asymptomatic COVID-19 infections that are probably contagious. Of course, someone who is symptomatic generally would want to avoid situations where they may give whatever they have to others, regardless of testing or whether what they have is COVID-19.
I don’t believe we have the science to say that. All we can really say is there is enough antigen to produce a positive.
I think it would be pretty unlikely to be on the backside, completely symptom free for days and still be infectious based on what’s being reported about clinical experience.
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Not sure how the rest of the country looks, but here in the upper midwest we are seeing plenty of influenza.
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I certainly agree that anyone with symptoms should assume they could have Covid, despite a negative rapid test. My point was just that the story told in the introduction to the WaPo article was sort of a no harm, no foul situation. There is no mention in that scenario of anyone even having symptoms. As told in the article, it didn’t seem like a compelling story of testing failure.
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Or possibly the PCR test picked up something from previous infection. On that is long past the contagious stage.
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Quick note that the free test site technically is in beta testing today and per son is currently running slowly. Also there are isolated reports that multi-unit buildings are being considered single households by the system and therefore subsequent requests from different apartments are being rejected. Hopefully a test engineer will get that straightened out ASAP.
Agreed…plenty of flu around the country. This map is updated regularly with actual data:
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Was it really slow for some? It took me less than a minute to do this.
Now…just waiting for the things to arrive in the mail!
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It wasn’t slow for me and I received an email confirming my order.
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