By Zee Kristic; Good Housekeeping
With experts concerned about a tripledemic, at-home COVID-19 tests are an essential tool to keeping healthy in 2023 — and pharmacies, department stores and public health clinics have plenty of easy-to-use options these days. Many of the take-home tests carrying an emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) make use of a control panel and a results window. In most cases, if a secondary line appears in the results window after a nasal swab is submitted, it signals that the test is positive. But users often lament (and commiserate!) when these tests return a result that isn't exactly clear; a faint line in the sample window that may not look as defined as a test's manufacturer portrays in testing instructions.
It's true that rapid COVID-19 tests aren't foolproof — user error can occur if instructions aren't followed carefully. So does that mean that a faint positive line may be misleading? Sadly, this is likely not the case, either. Existing research highlighted by experts at Massachusetts General Hospital indicates that a false positive is rare; in fact, a false positive is more likely to happen at the end of a COVID-19 illness than when SARS-CoV-2 initially infects someone.
If you're able to see a line of any shade or depth in your COVID-19 test's results window, you are indeed sick and likely contagious to others around you, says Emily Volk, M.D., FCAP, the president of the College of American Pathologists. "It's binary, right? It's either negative or it's positive — it's like a home pregnancy test. You can't be a little bit pregnant, right?" she posits. "So it's important if folks are seeing any sort of line with their own eyes, faint or otherwise, to respond as if they are positive and take the necessary precautions immediately."
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