I don't recall saying that.
> If you have a loss of smell/taste you should 100% assume you have Covid and act accordingly, get tested immediately, self quarantine for probably 14 whole days, and get retested at around 10 days.
Did I say otherwise?
What I said was, if you lose your sense of smell and taste and then proceed to test negative twice for COVID, you may well not have COVID.
Rapid tests are right 80% of the time. Two rapid tests back to back are right 96% of the time. That means after 2 tests there's a 96% chance you don't have COVID, and a 4% chance you do. That doesn't mean you should tour your nearest retirement community.
You shouldn't go out anywhere if you're sick in the first place.
[edit] Even then, there's a 1% false positive rate on PCR, and a 4% false negative rate on 2x rapid test. Even at this point there's a 20% chance OP doesn't have COVID.
I doubt the false negative % for two tests on the same person at roughly the same time are uncorrelated. (For two reasons: It seems logical that they would depend on viral load, and/or other non-random factors; And if they were independent, we would be able to achieve arbitrarily high specificity by taking and processing multiple samples -- just three would get you >99% -- which doesn't seem to be happening.) So the false negative rate for two tests might be much closer to 20% than 4%.
> That means after 2 tests there's a 96% chance you don't have COVID, and a 4% chance you do.
This part is definitely not accurate. The real probability will depend on base rates and facts about the individual case.
:sigh:
This is awful advice for 2021. (Even though _technically_ it's correct.)
If you have a loss of smell/taste you should 100% assume you have Covid and act accordingly, get tested immediately, self quarantine for probably 14 whole days, and get retested at around 10 days.
If you have "mild cold/flu symptoms" you should assume you like;y have covid, and should get tested (not with a "rapid test") and self isolate until you get a negative result.
Truth is, even with no symptoms, you could have Covid. If you've been in contact with anyone who has cold/flu symptoms, or been to a place where someone with a positive covid test has been - you should get tested (and probably self isolate until you get a negative result).
From: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Results: The baseline assumptions for the model were that peak infectiousness occurred at the median of symptom onset and that 30% of individuals with infection never develop symptoms and are 75% as infectious as those who do develop symptoms. Combined, these baseline assumptions imply that persons with infection who never develop symptoms may account for approximately 24% of all transmission. In this base case, 59% of all transmission came from asymptomatic transmission, comprising 35% from presymptomatic individuals and 24% from individuals who never develop symptoms. Under a broad range of values for each of these assumptions, at least 50% of new SARS-CoV-2 infections was estimated to have originated from exposure to individuals with infection but without symptoms.
Conclusions and Relevance: In this decision analytical model of multiple scenarios of proportions of asymptomatic individuals with COVID-19 and infectious periods, transmission from asymptomatic individuals was estimated to account for more than half of all transmissions. In addition to identification and isolation of persons with symptomatic COVID-19, effective control of spread will require reducing the risk of transmission from people with infection who do not have symptoms. These findings suggest that measures such as wearing masks, hand hygiene, social distancing, and strategic testing of people who are not ill will be foundational to slowing the spread of COVID-19 until safe and effective vaccines are available and widely used.