Can Recovered Coronavirus Patients Test Positive Again? Here's What To Know.

[iluvtennis]

Can Recovered Coronavirus Patients Test Positive Again? Here's What To Know.
This is what experts know about COVID-19 lingering when you no longer have symptoms and if it means you're still contagious.
By
Julia Ries
04/08/2020 05:45am EDT | Updated April 9, 2020
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/can-recovered-patients-test-positive-again_l_5e8c88c6c5b6e1a2e0fa481a

Chiara DiGiallorenzo first started feeling sick on March 6. She’d recently flown to Los Angeles to visit her boyfriend, and she hung out with a friend who was in town from London. Her friend wasn’t feeling well, but she figured he just had a 48-hour bug. Soon after, DiGiallorenzo and a few of her friends started to feel run down.

“We all had high fevers, terrible body aches and no sense of taste nor smell,” DiGiallorenzo, 25, told HuffPost. Her friends, all of whom are young and otherwise healthy, were able to beat the virus in a few days. But DiGiallorenzo, who has an underlying health condition, was still battling the sickness days later.

When she developed tightness in her chest, she decided to have a doctor check out her lungs and test her for COVID-19. A positive test came back two days later.

For about 10 days, DiGiallorenzo had a fever that ranged from 99.5 to 101.8 degrees Fahrenheit. On March 17, her symptoms cleared, and, according to the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that state you are no longer contagious three days after your symptoms end, she was officially released from isolation.

But out of an abundance of caution, she got checked out one more time by her doctor. Even though she no longer had symptoms, she again tested positive for COVID-19 — 20 days after she experienced her first symptom.

“My doctors are pretty unclear as to what my positive test indicates. They explained that it could either be that I still actively have the virus, or it is the dead virus [and] particles shedding,” DiGiallorenzo said. “It’s somewhat of a guessing game.”

Exactly how long COVID-19 lingers and spreads is still somewhat of a mystery.

DiGiallorenzo is right to say it’s somewhat of a guessing game. Researchers don’t know why some people are testing positive for longer than others ― and they’re scrambling to figure out if those prolonged positive test results mean people are still contagious.

A recent study out of Beijing examined 16 patients with COVID-19 and found that half continued to test positive even after their symptoms, such as cough and fever, ended. Those patients had “markers of shedding,” indicating they could still spread the disease for up to eight days after they recovered.

....continued at link

[still_one]

1. There was a similar incident reported by a healthcare professional, who tested positive,

supposedly recovered, retested negative, then two days later retested and it was positive

This was on CNN this morning.

Very troubling

[Wellstone ruled]

2. Chinese Medical folks said

they found people testing positive at a later date.

[Laffy Kat]

3. From what I understand, yes. nt

[Igel]

6. Absolutely.

But the question was, "Can you test positive again?" That's clearly the case.

Now, are you *infected* again and once more *contagious*? There's the rub.

There are false positives, a small percentage.

There are false negatives, a larger percentage. You test somebody twice and they're negative both times, there's still a greater than 9% chance that they're infected. About a 3% chance they're positive if you get 3 negatives in a row. About 1 in 100 will test negative four times in a row and still be infected.

They use test + symptoms. But if 30% are asymptomatic ...

[iluvtennis]

5. + 1. nt