I'd retest. you either have some of the worst luck ever, or you had a false positive test.

Yup. Unless OP had symptoms, there is a chance that’s a false positive.

There are people who have flown on flights with actively infectious cases of Covid. Following hygiene practices, none of the passengers got infected.

The virus has a multi-week incubation period, during which you're infectious despite not yet showing symptoms. Even if you never show symptoms, you can still carry and transmit the virus.

Symptoms (or the lack thereof) are not an indicator of whether or not someone has contracted it.

Yeah, I know.

OP has stated they've left their home twice in the past 5 months, the last time 4 weeks ago and they just tested positive.

The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low, otherwise we wouldn't be doing 14 day quarantines.

Is it possible OP is a rare edge case? Sure. But not likely.

> The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low

I'm thinking this may be true. Dr. John Campbell has a fantastic video[1] that suggests we may be overlooking one possible symptom in otherwise asymptomatic populations: Skin rashes. That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone gets skin rashes with COVID-19, but it appears that it may be an early clinical feature of the disease even in people who are otherwise spared the worst.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeKDzwhi8nw

Are false positives common with PCR tests? How would that even happen? Does anybody have any insight?

The PCR tests for RNA, not active, replicating viruses.

The theory is one may find detectable RNA fragments, without the person truly having an active infection (I.e. they’ve already recovered).

There is also just human error with sample handling, contamination, etc.

I see stories like this constantly:

https://www.wsmv.com/news/mt-juliet-man-says-even-with-no-te...

It's sometimes someone driving to a testing site and then leaving the line. If that's true and they're not rechecking your personal information at the swab, it's unsettling because then everyone's results are now off-by-one (or more).

There are other cases where people have been told they have COVID after never even having been in line for a test. Not that they might have it via contact tracing, but that they tested positive from a test they never took (or got in line for).

Not to mention there was the cast of a Goat and an Orange testing positive in Tanzania:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/coronavirus-...

What is going on with these tests?

You see stories like this constantly because salacious stories like this grab eyeballs.

The actual incidence of this kind of error is incredibly small.

I don't think it is bad luck.

People doing deliveries are probably the most at risk right now, and the outside of deliveries, the plastic bags, I always treat them as if they are full of Covid-19.

And I'm sure most people don't go to restaurants any more, but they get food deliveries all the time.

I cook instead. One risk less.

Likely part of a grouped test - which absolutely should have been retested by the lab.

I don't understand how grouped testing makes any sense when such a large percentage of individual tests come out positive.

I mean, if you group 10 samples from a test center, what's the probability of one of them being positive? Isn't it close to 1.0?

Depends on their group test size and what factors they consider when they decide to group or not. It's why they ask if you're a first responder for example (least they do around here).

There will always be statistical outliers. I'm sorry it was you and I hope that you are part of the majority of humans who experience mild symptoms.

Its not an outliar. It's quite common.

Which is? To catch the disease while isolated in your home? Or get a positive test result after staying isolated at home?

The latter seems like it would be far more common than the former.

That is an extremely poor and dangerous characterization of this pathology.

I'll quote some people smarter than me.

“In the beginning, our model for understanding this infection was to treat it like another respiratory virus like influenza,” said John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. “I think one of the most unfortunate and interesting things about this virus is that its interaction with us is actually far more complicated than that.”

"This virus is unusual and it's hard not to take a step back and not be impressed by how many manifestations it has on the human body" author of https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0968-3

The "majority" (87%) still experience symptoms months later https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 including scar tissue on the heart and lungs, blood clots, up to 37% experience acute kidney injury.

Please don't imply that 87% of cases suffer long term effects. This study is limited to COVID patients who experienced acute symptoms, a small subset of all COVID patients.

This is not the flu, but if it sounds too scary to believe, it probably is when it comes to COVID.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "acute symptoms" because that is not a distinction made by the paper. The subjects in the study were simply all cases discharged from the hospital with a negative test, not meeting some acute standard you set. only 12% of them were ever admitted to ICU, for instance.

You are free to infer what you want from the lack of data about the other cases which the paper did not cover, but that is not how i interact with science. A complete lack of data should never be the basis of your hypothesis.

In that case it's extremely likely that the test result was wrong, no?

What prompted the test - are you experiencing any symptoms? When you say we, I assume you mean a partner. Did they also leave the property? And what kind of test did you get?

Is there any publicly-available data or studies on the behavior patterns of people who caught the virus? I’m very curious about what the relative likelihoods involved. e.g. what % of cases are people that don’t wear masks and brazenly party at bars, versus people who limit their activity to outdoor exercise and 1 or 2 errands a week.

I'm so sorry. That must be incredibly discouraging and scary. How do you think you caught it?

Just speculating, but I think the idea that it is safer to have your groceries delivered (a necessity if you are not leaving property) rather than go to the grocery store yourself is just flat wrong. I know several (admittedly only three) people who have caught COVID but have not left their apartment and/or house since Jan.

I am trying not to speculate too much how we got it but generally I agree. We used alcohol spray and bleach wipes on all our delivered groceries, but in hindsight it seems to me like the delivery drivers were the likely carrier.

In most countries with successful quarantines, these people are regulated and tested, but for us it is kind of the opposite. These are people paid hourly and highly dependent upon a paycheck. It is an incentivized super-spreader paradigm if you think about it.

I'm not disputing your practices, but I was in the same boat as you, then recently saw this article and have since relaxed a bit on some of the cleaning protocol we've been following: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hy...

The takeaway of that article is that cleaning surfaces to reduce the likelihood of contact transmission (which is close to 0), may detract from practices that reduce the likelihood of airborne transmission (which is close to 1.0 if you're near an infected person).

That's a perfectly sensible approach if you're in charge of a school or a retail business. There's a cost vs benefit and lost opportunity calculation.

In our personal lives, taking 1-3 minutes to wipe down all groceries isn't going to cause you to suddenly forget wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible, unless you have extremely bad executive functioning.

Doesn't it stand to reason that delivery drivers would be in the grocery store as well?

Not sure what you are getting at here. I agree the delivery drivers are in the grocery store. They probably spend half their workday there and have to travel throughout the store many many times, each time navigating a different cohort of shoppers, and then come in contact with deliveree surfaces (doorbell, etc.) as well. The delivery driver has a dangerous job and is highly likely to get covid. When s/he does, so do all the deliverees.

The same way the rest of the US will. A complete lack of leadership at the national level. Seriously, there is no individual level response to this.

The hardest part is that I was in New Zealand for the previous 7 months and decided to leave when the US announced they were closing borders (and forgot to mention they would remain open for citizens)

You would have been in 'good company' as a 'refugee' there: https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-has-been-a-covid-refugee...

Hope you get well soon!

HVAC is a likely culprit

Actually we live in a standalone house and have not turned the AC on all year.

It is broken and we were just backpacking through southern hemisphere summer so we haven't bothered.

I mean, that anecdote doesn't make me think that staying at home is "not overboard", it makes me think that it's entirely pointless.

From your other comment, I see you're in the US. Do you mind if I ask which state?

Atlanta, GA

Thank you.