It's not enough and not often enough, but may as well take your free tests when you can.
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Just as a reminder, these are antigen tests.
Antigen tests help to gauge infectiousness. PCR tests gauge if you’ve contracted the virus.
Antigen tests will be NEGATIVE if your body is not producing a certain amount of COVID antigens (ie you were just infected). If you’re worried that you may have contracted COVID and/or are asymptomatic then you NEED A PCR TEST.
And if you do have COVID please use an antigen test 14 days after your first positive test (whether that was antigen or PCR) and KEEP TESTING EVERY 48 HOURS UNTIL YOU ARE NEGATIVE.
Oh and WEAR A GODDAMN MASK
It's so awesome how expiration dates are meaningless labels that can be conveniently extended. Totally an indicator I want to put my trust into in the future.
It's the same for food expiration dates. I treat them as an "ideal before this date, be more observant about the quality of this thing after" date
I was thinking the same thing. The efficacy of home tests are already waning, now we are promoting the use of expired tests with an already waning efficacy…
I'm struggling to see how this is a bad thing worthy of scare terms and sarcasm. If the dates were being moved forward and backward, that would be concerning, but they're not.
in amerikkka, would not count on it
local city/county health departments can offer no-cost flu/covid shots for the uninsured (call to confirm):
https://www.naccho.org/membership/lhd-directory
free clinics may also be an option:
https://nafcclinics.org/find-clinic/
Do these tests detect the latest strains? Are these just leftovers from the last time the government sent out free tests?
I think all of the rapid tests are the same as they've ever been, which is relatively inaccurate and therefore you are best taking multiple tests 48 hours apart to verify negativity. False negatives are relatively common, but false positives are rare. It's not a great tool, but it's one of the few we can get for free sometimes.
You gotta keep in mind false negatives are most commonly caused by user error and the test not detecting enough COVID antigens in the sample. Antigen tests gauge infectiousness. But even if you have symptoms you may still test negative because your body isn’t producing enough of the measurable antigens. So the antigen tests are one good tool to help gauge when you are no longer infectious.
If you’re testing negative after 14 days but still have symptoms then you might still be infectious.
Good to hear. Some sicknesses have been popping around lately. Cleared my throat after some rice and beans and I'm probably gonna worry someone.
