I hope I'm not talking out of turn but
@rapmarks recently shared that she's newly facing a serious health issue. It stands to reason that others who will be in the same facility in which she's seeing the specialist on Wednesday will also be dealing with compromised health putting them at high risk for COVID complications, so it doesn't sound unreasonable that the facility asks all patients to get the COVID test that returns the most reliable results.
I do agree, though, that they should not be forcing their patients to jump through hoops and be inconvenienced by the tests. They should be making it as easy as possible, and any of rapmarks' suggestions for getting tested closer to home should be allowed.
More likely I am the one talking out of turn
It is just so frustrating that rules are all over the map. Agree, as I recall
@rapmarks is facing some serious health issues. But, again speaking out of turn, how much can she afford to put off treatment? I agree she'll likely be around other very serious ill people. My son-in-law/daughter's 2 year old niece is undergoing very extreme treatment for Ewing sarcoma. Her family and grandparents were all positive, she was the last of them to test positive. Because she was asymptomatic, they still did treatment (finishing up chemo and starting radiation). And they allowed her positive mother to stay with her, because the 2 year old was so upset when they tried to separate them.
In the hospital where where my daughter works, after 10 or 14 days they are no longer considered contagious. They do not retest. They are on the floor with other non-covid patients. They adjust policy all the time, but the 10/14 day thing has been in place for quite some time.
Obviously this specialist gets to make the call, but is that feasible or practical today? And I guess it doesn't matter how anyone but the specialist feels about this.
You can PCR test positive for a long time. I'll post an excerpt at the end so it's not so mixed in the middle of my comments.
Maybe they need a baseline (and should make things a lot more convenient for their patients) but then wouldn't a negative rapid test the day of a visit make a whole lot more sense?
And maybe if you PCR test positive they then fall into a different criteria? Maybe the question here is what will they do moving forward if she PCR tests positive on Wednesday? Is this a requirement for every visit?
More from the peanut gallery - isn't it crazy that in 2022, this is a review of 113 studies? Seriously?
OK... here's the excerpt from an article I found on the Verywellhealth.com website:
PCR tests are more sensitive, and are able to detect the presence of the virus earlier. But they can also detect the presence of COVID-19 well past the point of when it’s contagious.
"We found that after [people] recovered from any symptoms, we could occasionally detect very low levels of RNA, which was the target of the [PCR] test, for up to 12 weeks,”
Alan Wells, MD, DMSc, medical director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Clinical Laboratories, told Verywell.
According to a CDC review of 113 studies, COVID-19 is only contagious ranging from two to three days before symptom onset to eight days after.