For context, my wife is a physician. Had a patient that turned out to be positive, test negative while in the hospital. A day later, he was intubated. While he was intubated, his original, outpatient, test from 11 days earlier came back positive.
If you administer the test when you don’t have symptoms it useless as well since most likely you will miss the window.
If you take it while symptomatic, I believe the sensitivity is improved, so if it comes back negative, you can be pretty assured that you just have a regular cold, right?
For those of us who aren't showing symptoms and aren't at high risk for exposure, there's no point in testing us unless the test becomes super cheap.
I think the jury's still out on the odds of achieving even temporary immunity after having caught it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-covid-19-infection-equal-i...