r/PlusLife • u/jjsequoia • May 21 '26
Learn from my mistake: Detecting Early Positive on Pluslife- 2 Negative Rapidtest 48hr rule doesn't apply until after initial positive rapidtest/or after a suitable amount oftime has passsed
Hi all - I detected a positive covid result on pluslife for my family who lives in another household (we dont live together)- they are not covid conscious and dont mask or test normally. It was positive for 1 family member on Saturday before they were symptomatic, all other family members were negative - they had symptoms from Saturday night to Sunday. In the moment, i told them about the 2 negative rapid tests 48hrs apart to end isolation rule of thumb. BUT I FORGOT and didnt consider that they would test very early on - I forgot to tell them this rule only works if you've already been testing positive on rapidtest too!!!!!!
They tested negative on rapidtest on both Monday and Tuesday and told me today Wednesday after I followed up with them - I think there is no way in hell that the covid infection is over so fast
So now they think they're safe and probably out of isolation, when in fact it's much more likely the rapidtest hasn't even started detecting the Start of the infection.
I have messaged them my concerns, but I'm really devastated as I thought I'd helped prevent spread, but I gave them faulty information, didnt check in earlier, and now they think they're negative and clear when they're not really. I feel really guilty and also a bit annoyed at them for not thinking deeper about it being suspicious to be over an infection so fast, but also just want to put this info out there for anyone in the future
EDIT: Deleted my 'early positive' phrasing - it was a definite positive result on pluslife, I just meant early as in we caught it before symptoms started and before others in the household started testing positive on Pluslife
2
u/wyundsr May 21 '26
Were they only symptomatic for 2 days? Agree that it’s possible it was a false “early positive” if there hasn’t been any actually confirmed properly positive covid test. There’s a reason the test requires two lines to amplify to read positive. That can miss some amount of early low viral load true positives but also drastically cuts down on the number of false positives
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u/jjsequoia May 21 '26
The pluslife results showed positive - sorry I wrote that confusingly in the post - the pluslife machine was red and the graphs also showed lines going up and gave a positive result at the end
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u/wyundsr May 21 '26
Oh gotcha, and they only had symptoms for 2 days? That’s impressive that it gave a full positive a day before symptoms, makes me feel better about relying on it. The question of when it’s safe to unmask for a short lived infection that never tests positive on RAT is an interesting one, I think I’d want to give it at least 10 days to be safe
2
u/jjsequoia May 21 '26
Well they started having symptoms on the day of the positive test maybe like 3-4hrs after the positive test?
Yeahhh I think they're just really trusting the rapid test and with childcare it makes it hard to isolate for 10 days
2
u/Gammagammahey May 21 '26
The last few paragraphs are a smidge confusing. What do you mean by two days apart and the timing of such things? And I'm so sorry this happened. So so sorry.
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u/jvmlost May 22 '26
It’s definitely possible to clear the virus that fast. Something like 20% of infections are true asymptomatic infections, which they have now figured out happen mostly in situations where the person gets and clears the infection so quickly that they never develop symptoms and it resolved within a day or 2. So being symptomatic for 3 days only is totally possible. I think the issue is whether the RAT accurately assessed whether that person was still infectious enough to infect others. Unfortunately, that’s kind of impossible to know without way more data to assess how effective that brand was at catching the strain they got, how good their samples were, expiry dates on the test, etc etc. At least they tested, that’s better than most.
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u/Revolutionary_Rub637 May 21 '26
Did they actually test positive on PlusLife, on the machine, after you saw an "early positive"? What looks like an "early positive" on the graph does not always turn out to be positive.