U.S. to require negative Covid-19 tests for international air passengers
I have an interesting anecdote related to this.As it happens, I currently have COVID. When I first noticed I was getting sick, I was scheduled to fly in the near future, so I got a rapid COVID test that delivers results in 15 minutes.It was negative. I got another one, and it was negative too. I had thus intended to go ahead with the trip under the assumption I had a minor cold.Later, a few days before I was to fly, I lost all smell and taste. Now I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t particularly congested, and the loss of smell was total. I’d never experienced this before. Could both tests have been false negatives?I delayed the flight (free of charge luckily, so no big deal) and got a test that had to be sent to a lab for analysis. A week later, the positive test result came back.Take from this what you will. I'm not a scientist or a doctor and frankly there's nothing remotely intelligent I can say about the various tests out there for COVID. But if the rapid tests are as unreliable in general as they were for me, it’s sort of no wonder COVID is spreading like wildfire. I was very, very close to boarding a plane with an active case of COVID, and I would have if I hadn’t acted out of an abundance of caution.