HELP - still testing covid positive after 90 days!

[Dan_The_Man]

Anyone been in this situation: we have been doing the voluntary ONS testing for over a year. At Christmas our household all tested positive, adults were very ill but 2x kids were fine, did the 10 days isolation and slowly got back to normal. We get ONS (PCR) tested roughly every 4 weeks and the next test was the end of Jan and all apart from my son have since tested negative. He's tested positive every 4 weeks since having covid which was fine as there is a clause that says government test trials members don't have to re-isolate within 90 days of having covid. However the last test (still positive) just exceeded the initial 90 days and track and trace are insisting the whole house isolates again for another 10 days. Twice weekly school lateral flow covid tests are all negative. Anyone had this situation ? wondering how the hell to explain this to work that I can't go in again.

[Daveb257]

Dan, not sure where you are but in Wales the local TTP would pass to local EHO & schools liaison for a decision on family members/ contacts?

[Dan_The_Man]

England, I was hoping to call the ONS for guidance but they are shut till after the weekend.

Edited by Dan_The_Man on Saturday 3rd April 15:43

[jackh707]

Stop testing!

If he’s not got a fever or unwell, you really don’t need to.

PCR can be very sensitive and can still pick up RNA fragments and giving “false” positives a long time after the initial infection.

Unless newly symptomatic it’s irrelevant.

[Dan_The_Man]

jackh707 said:

Stop testing!

Too late but you are right, however after this isolation we will have a further 90 days isolation immunity

[Ashfordian]

Dan_The_Man said:

jackh707 said:

Stop testing!

Too late but you are right, however after this isolation we will have a further 90 days isolation immunity

Are you going to test him again in 90 days and risk further isolation?

[Dan_The_Man]

Ashfordian said:

Are you going to test him again in 90 days and risk further isolation?

Nope we will all stop, it's just not worth the hassle. Initially we were thinking we were doing the right thing helping by doing the tests for the ONS survey but had not predicted this outcome.

[sutoka]

A relative of mine was in hospital for 15 weeks and tested positive four times, he also tested negative 8 times.

So if the tests are to be believed he had Covid-19 four times. In advance years approaching 90 and he had absolutely no symptoms whatsoever, no cough nothing.

[Dan_The_Man]

We thought we would use up the 90 days isolation immunity to keep on testing, he was still positive in May but YAY finally we got a negative on 29th July so we had 2 weeks holiday and decided to continue tests since it had finally cleared. All went tits up last week as he's back to being positive so luckily it's only him isolating now and it's school holidays so he's happy gaming at home. Start of Dec 2020 was his first positive test so it's stuck with him for 9 months, still at least he's back on 90 days isolation immunity at the start of school. The ONS use shopping vouchers as an incentive to test so we have saved about £2K from our grocery shop which is a big deal in what's been a difficult financial couple of years.