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a lateral flow did not detect covid at 9am on Saturday in a snotty 6 year old, but a PCR did at 2pm
That is expected. A PCR might be positive on days 2-12 after an infection on day 0. A LFT is more likely to be positive around days 5-8 (or similar).
Where an LFT might add value is if someone is asymptomatic. There is also apparently some correlation between shedding enough virus to be likely to infect someone else and an LFT positive test.
If you and your daughter are up for some experimentation you could lateral flow test you and your family every day for the next week or so. Would be interesting to see when, if ever, they are positive.
jellybaby-
Thanks - interesting. The only thing I can't get my head around is how if she had a runny nose because those were her visible first symptoms of covid, how her snot did not contain enough virus to show up. To me, that seems a serious shortcoming as we could easily be living in blissful ignorance if not for our belt and braces approach.
I'm very tempted to do more LFDs, but don't think the misses wants me running an experiment on her at this moment. She's stressing big time already.
Scrabble
And in my test case of one, it seems a lateral flow did not detect covid at 9am on Saturday in a snotty 6 year old, but a PCR did at 2pm. Since then, she had a temperature on Sunday and has woken today with a cough.
We could have accepted the LFT and as a household carried on our business assuming it was just a cold (as has been going round her class). Instead we're now on total lockdown.
My hunch is that they are just not sensitive/accurate enough.