#RAPID RSV ANTIGEN TEST FOR FREE#

Therefore, a positive result tends to mean the person has a high viral load, especially if symptoms appeared. First, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, “a major advantage” of rapid antigen tests is that they are somewhat blunt tools for picking up on the virus. The odds are very slim, outside of a laboratory setting, that someone who gets a positive result on a rapid antigen test is a non-infectious person shedding large amounts of dead virus, said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. It’s widely known that PCR tests, the highly sensitive polymerase chain reaction tests that detect viral genetic material, can pick up “dead” virus - material not capable of replicating - and yield a positive result for weeks after recovery, even when the person being tested is no longer infectious.īut virologists say that’s unlikely to be the case for the rapid antigen tests - which detect certain proteins in the virus and produce results within 30 minutes - that are headed for people’s mailboxes.

That influx of tests comes on the heels of revised federal guidelines that shortened the isolation period to five days after symptoms started or a positive test, followed by five days of masking. The Biden administration is buying a billion rapid antigen tests to ship to American homes, aiming to address the need for increased COVID testing and ease a nationwide shortage of tests.

#RAPID RSV ANTIGEN TEST FOR FREE#

READ MORE: Website for free virus tests is here. “Anytime you’re positive by one of these rapid at-home COVID tests, it means that you’ve still got a really high level of the viral protein, and most experts are interpreting that as a high level of virus present in your nasal passage,” said Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic and president of the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology. What does it mean if a person’s rapid antigen test result comes back positive after five days of isolation due to COVID-19? According to the experts, that person is most likely still carrying a viral load high enough to infect others.

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