however none of us have a dry cough

or an obvously high fever

or impared tast/smell (other than what a blocked nose brings)

so I guess its just a heavy cold...

annoying sore throat though

Hope you get better soon.

@U793EL04V Get tested. I’ve been tested 4 times, very easy to book, and there are test sites everywhere now. Last two times we got the results back within 24h.

sore throat is also officially recognised as a symptom now

oh is it, I've not been keeping up

A sore throat was why I got one of those tests (negative)

How accurate are the tests over there? We have a cousin with COVID and her husband tested negative, even tho' he was clearly sick, and the wife tested positive with milder symptoms.

He caught it first -- his symptoms started August 7th -- and then her symptoms started exactly a week later. He was getting better but he's gotten worse in the last couple of days.

I would guess it doesn't cost anything to get tested in the UK (unlike here)?

Yeah it’s totally free for the anti-gen tests, the anti-body tests aren’t as widely available… Though IIRC about £80 to get a private one. I think the tests are pretty accurate; if you fall in the right window at least. I did look at the claimed false positive/negative rates and I seem to remember them being pretty high (like 95+%) but can’t recall the exact figure. I remember finding the exact test process and the official results for it too. I think the biggest risk is that you can test too early or too late for it.

Could be. Larry and Vikki both got tested at the same time and he was a week further along with his symptoms. They've been so careful about exposure (they live in rural Alaska so there's not many people to get exposed to -- they think he got it from visiting a government building about a week before his symptoms appeared). Despite BoJo's incompetence, right now I think I'd prefer to be in the UK than in the US, for the affordable healthcare 😐

Thanks for the info.

I had an idea the accuracy was around 80%

although I'm not sure I could lay my hands on the source of that figure

quaranting seems to be emphasing TWO tests a few days apart

although if you get a positive, followed by a negative you will be left uncertain...

doing your own, or your loved one's swab must be quite a learned skill

> The RT-PCR assays used for the UK’s COVID-19 testing programme have been verified by PHE, and show over 95% sensitivity and specificity. This means that under laboratory conditions, these RT-PCR tests should never show more than 5% false positives or 5% false negatives. It goes on to discuss the operational rates: > An attempt has been made to estimate the likely false-positive rate of national COVID-19 testing programmes by examining data from published external quality assessments (EQAs) for RT-PCRassays for other RNA viruses carried out between 2004-2019 [7]. Results of 43 EQAs were examined, giving a median false positive rate of 2.3% (interquartile range 0.8-4.0%). Operational false negatives are of course much harder to assess: > The UK operational false negative rate is unknown. A recent study [6] combined results from seven studies (>1300 swab test results associated with time of disease onset) to create a model of the false negative rate for SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR assays against time since infection. Their model suggested that in the first four days of infection (pre-symptomatic phase) the probability of a false negative in an infected person decreased from 100% on day 1 (i.e. a false negative was certain) to 67% on day 4. It then decreased to 38% on day 5 (dayof symptom onset) to a minimum of 20% on day 8 of infection (i.e. one in five people still give a false negative result despite having experienced three days of COVID-19 symptoms). The false negative rate then increased from day 9 (21%) to day 21 (66%). Point estimates and confidence intervals are shown in Figure 1 [taken from 6]. So in practice there’s quite a lot of operational error… Having taken the tests 4 times (3x self administered) I can confirm it’s pretty unpleasant and quite awkward to self administer. I very nearly threw up the last time doing the throat swab. more details in the Public Health England report: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/895843/S0519_Impact_of_false_positives_and_negatives.pdf