I am personally dealing with people that keep testing positive a MONTH after initial diagnosis. Dr's cannot sign a release to return to work because of the positive tests.

Question: Should we be mandating specific tests? FDA approved tests? I'm wondering if some of the different tests are showing positive results for antibodies and not necessarily infection. These people have been asymptomatic for 4 weeks.

If it is the nasal swab test they are testing positive for the actual RNA component of the virus, meaning the virus is still detected in the secretions of their nasopharynx.

Are you concerned about false positives? Or you don't understand that you can be asymptomatic and spread the virus?

Duncan Idaho said:

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Are you concerned about false positives? Or you don't understand that you can be asymptomatic and spread the virus?

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No, I'm concerned that the test will test positive the rest of your life.

PearlJammin said:

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Duncan Idaho said:

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Are you concerned about false positives? Or you don't understand that you can be asymptomatic and spread the virus?

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No, I'm concerned that the test will test positive the rest of your life.

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Right now that isn't an impossibility. With the data coming out of Korea, there is a slim chance that this could be a lifelong infection that will flare up from time to time and need to be managed with antivirals.

a touch of AIDS

cone said:

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a touch of AIDS

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I was thinking herpes. But yeah

I have a friend who "got past" the virus and felt great for 6 days. He was fever free, ready to go back to work and even start jogging again. Went in for his test and it was positive. In total, he was about 26 days in from his first symptoms to that test. It took another 3 days before he got a negative test.

Thank you guys for the information! Just incredible that it can take 5 weeks to completely get over this thing.

Maroon Elephant said:

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I have a friend who "got past" the virus and felt great for 6 days. He was fever free, ready to go back to work and even start jogging again. Went in for his test and it was positive. In total, he was about 26 days in from his first symptoms to that test. It took another 3 days before he got a negative test.

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That isn't surprising. There was an experiment with intentionally infected monkeys. They tested positive for virus for 28 days. It can take a while to clear this virus.

Just a reminder that being RNA positive for virus also doesn't mean you are necessarily producing infectious viral particles. To my knowledge that as been no such study on these type of patients to see if detecting viral RNA weeks later = actual virus

Also it depends on the Ct values that are being returned from these tests. A "positive" is a value </= 35 but that's really not a lot of viral genome detected.

Lots of caveats to consider but still weird nonetheless

PearlJammin said:

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Thank you guys for the information! Just incredible that it can take 5 weeks to completely get over this thing.

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Having said that, I don't think people commonly get retested for other viral infections after they are back to feeling good - perhaps this is typical for viral infections in general?