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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-
Aren't the instructions blow your nose before so that no snot gets on the swab?
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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.
Early on in an infection you can have the virus in your body in low quantities but enough that your body mounts its immune response and you start to display symptoms such as fever/chills/sore throat/runny nose/cough, etc but it hasn't got to the point where the viral load is so much that it's spilling out of your mouth/nose in such quantities that could pose a problem for others nearby.
All the time after you're infected your immune response will be ramping up but, at the same time, the virus is replicating within your body. How serious the symptoms and damage are depend on how well and how swiftly the immune response starts to get the infection under control.
Lateral Flow isn't a test for being infected - that's a PCR test.
Lateral Flow is a test for being infectious - i.e. producing enough viral load to possibly infect others, and it's far from perfectAs the Government Guidance states, if you have symptoms then you shouldn't be doing a Lateral Flow test, you should go straight for a PCR.
And, as jellybaby says, the window for infectiousness (and tripping a lateral flow test) is a relatively short period (just a few days) of the overall infection window (a few weeks).
Once your body gets on top of the infection and your immune response has ramped up you may still display some/many of the symptoms (as above) but may stop producing enough virus out of your mouth/nose as to no longer be actively infectious and a danger to others. A lateral flow at test at this stage may return a negative but a PCR test should still return a positive.
LFDs are primarily to pick up on asymptomatic infections, because there isn't enough lab capacity to do PCR tests on everyone all the time. In an ideal world anyone/everyone could do a PCR test whenever they want, and get a result in a nice short time span.
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Technically we are only advised to get a PCR test if we have:
a high temperature
a new, continuous cough
you’ve lost your sense of smell or taste or it’s changedSo, if you were following government guidance, you'd still be none the wiser.
greentricky
Greenbank
Stonehedge
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.