NYT Here’s what you need to know about when to take a test for accurate results, and how to get kits for free.
While Covid has become a regular part of respiratory virus season, community testing centers and drive-through sites where you could determine whether it’s the source of your sniffles have all but vanished.
At-home tests are still a valuable tool to protect yourself and others from the virus, though, and they remain widely available in pharmacies and grocery stores.
Here’s what to know about how these tests work, how to get them and when to take one.
Do rapid tests still work?
Yes. Even with a new variant, JN.1, dominating cases nationwide, rapid tests should be able to accurately capture whether you are contagious. That is because rapid tests detect a protein inside the virus, rather than the spike protein on the surface of the virus that has changed across variants, said Aubree Gordon, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. Still, there’s a catch: You need to test at the right time.
So when should I test?
Experts recommend testing once you develop symptoms and throughout your illness, if possible. But if you are low on tests, you may want to wait around three to four days after you have developed symptoms. “If it were me and I knew I only had one test, and I became symptomatic this morning, I would not use that test today,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a former Harvard epidemiologist who is now the chief science officer for eMed, a health care technology company that offers Covid testing and virtual care. “I’d use it the day after tomorrow.”