When a young mother in Canada continued to test positive for COVID-19 for 55 days straight, she and the baby were separated the entire length of time. Her case is not unusual, though, according to Stat News, and the situation raises questions as to whether repeated testing is necessary or effective.
It also poses a dilemma in determining whether a person is still infectious: Since a popular test, known as a PCR, can’t tell whether you’re currently emitting virus that can infect someone else, or if the test simply picked up debris that’s shed when the disease is over (meaning you’re not infectious) a repeated positive test may cause health providers to make erroneous decisions with the care and advice they give COVID patients.
“The only way to know if a person is actually still infectious — shedding or emitting what’s known as ‘replication-competent virus’ — is to try to grow virus from a specimen from that person,” Stat News said, and that isn’t easy to do.
On top of that, there are few studies on just how long a person is infectious. And until they do figure that out, one problem is going to remain: “If we’re going to use this test to figure out who’s safe to go back, a lot of people are going to be held out of work when they don’t need to,” John Brooks, chief medical officer for the Covid-19 response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Stat News.
SOURCE: Stat News June 8, 2020