Wait a few days before you test for COVID

Peak viral load is later than it used to be

Photo by Semyon Borisov on Unsplash

For most of us, COVID is no longer the big scary beast it was in 2020. Yet we still want to avoid it for obvious — and less obvious — reasons. Yes, it makes you feel lousy and you miss work and fun events. More importantly, everyone knows someone with immune system issues for whom a COVID infection is far more dangerous. Your parents and grandparents may have lower immune defenses and complicating conditions like cardiac and respiratory conditions. Our immune strength falls as our age rises. Plus people with autoimmune or dysautonomic conditions can be harmed by a COVID infection, including chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, RA, IBD, celiac and type 1 diabetes. In aggregate, these conditions are common and invisible, affecting one in ten American residents.

Back in 2020, before many of us were infected with COVID or vaccinated in 2021, exposure to COVID meant staying home and going to a physician’s office or a testing center for a slow but reliable test. Now, we have a drawer at home with rapid tests that are reliable and completely misused.

Why misused? We’re simply testing too early and not retesting when we might be contagious. Or we’re not testing at all.

A new study came out at the end of September in Clinical Infectious Diseases that says don’t test when you first feel symptoms. Instead test on the fourth day of symptoms. That’s when your viral load (the amount of virus in your system that can infect others) is at its peak and your test is more likely to be accurate. Of course, as soon as you’re symptomatic, behave like you are contagious. After all it’s also flu season. Even the common cold is an unwelcome gift. To protect those around you, stay home, or stay masked, or both.

If you do test before the fourth day after symptoms appear, please test again if the result is negative. Don’t pretend that early test is enough. It’s not. And you’re now a poser telling everyone you just sneezed on that it’s seasonal allergies. In fact, your viral load and the chance you may infect someone continues to rise after that early test, making you more infectious over the next few days.

Why is the average viral peak load now later than before? Because so many people in the US have had COVID, we are considered a highly immune adult population and the virus has to work harder to break through our immune systems. And that’s fine for most of us but for approximately 10 percent of your friends and family, the virus is just as deadly and damaging as it was before.

One more interesting fact for those of you who have healthy immune systems. If you do get COVID, the odds of you developing an autoimmune condition have shot up. It’s one of the key contributing factors to the significant increase in people with new autoimmune conditions.

So, while most of us aren’t afraid of COVID anymore, we have good reasons to test and to test when it counts. Wait for day four.