Symptoms can linger for days or weeks after testing negative, even for those who don’t develop long Covid.
Q: It’s been a week since I tested negative for Covid, but I don’t feel totally better. Why am I still sick?
The rapid test is finally, blissfully, negative after a week of dark red positives. You’re technically over Covid — but the virus doesn’t seem to be over you, as fatigue, coughing or a general sense of “blah” persists.
If symptoms linger for four or more weeks after a negative test, that’s the point at which they could first be identified as long Covid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But for some people, there’s a murky middle stage: Your Covid test is negative and you still feel sick, but you aren’t technically in long Covid territory yet, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. “A lot of people bounce back really quickly” after a Covid infection, said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. But for many people, “it takes them two, three, four weeks to fully recover,” he said.
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