IMO you can't be "overboard." I've been in self-quarantine since March and have left my property exactly twice, over a month ago, when my dog needed surgery.
Yesterday we tested positive.
I mean, if you group 10 samples from a test center, what's the probability of one of them being positive? Isn't it close to 1.0?
https://www.wsmv.com/news/mt-juliet-man-says-even-with-no-te...
It's sometimes someone driving to a testing site and then leaving the line. If that's true and they're not rechecking your personal information at the swab, it's unsettling because then everyone's results are now off-by-one (or more).
There are other cases where people have been told they have COVID after never even having been in line for a test. Not that they might have it via contact tracing, but that they tested positive from a test they never took (or got in line for).
Not to mention there was the cast of a Goat and an Orange testing positive in Tanzania:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/coronavirus-...
What is going on with these tests?
The actual incidence of this kind of error is incredibly small.
There are people who have flown on flights with actively infectious cases of Covid. Following hygiene practices, none of the passengers got infected.
Symptoms (or the lack thereof) are not an indicator of whether or not someone has contracted it.
OP has stated they've left their home twice in the past 5 months, the last time 4 weeks ago and they just tested positive.
The chance of them being an asymptomatic carrier is actually pretty low, otherwise we wouldn't be doing 14 day quarantines.
Is it possible OP is a rare edge case? Sure. But not likely.
I'm thinking this may be true. Dr. John Campbell has a fantastic video[1] that suggests we may be overlooking one possible symptom in otherwise asymptomatic populations: Skin rashes. That doesn't mean, of course, that everyone gets skin rashes with COVID-19, but it appears that it may be an early clinical feature of the disease even in people who are otherwise spared the worst.
The theory is one may find detectable RNA fragments, without the person truly having an active infection (I.e. they’ve already recovered).
There is also just human error with sample handling, contamination, etc.
People doing deliveries are probably the most at risk right now, and the outside of deliveries, the plastic bags, I always treat them as if they are full of Covid-19.
And I'm sure most people don't go to restaurants any more, but they get food deliveries all the time.
I cook instead. One risk less.
The latter seems like it would be far more common than the former.
I'll quote some people smarter than me.
“In the beginning, our model for understanding this infection was to treat it like another respiratory virus like influenza,” said John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases and vaccinology in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. “I think one of the most unfortunate and interesting things about this virus is that its interaction with us is actually far more complicated than that.”
"This virus is unusual and it's hard not to take a step back and not be impressed by how many manifestations it has on the human body" author of https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0968-3
The "majority" (87%) still experience symptoms months later https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 including scar tissue on the heart and lungs, blood clots, up to 37% experience acute kidney injury.
This is not the flu, but if it sounds too scary to believe, it probably is when it comes to COVID.
You are free to infer what you want from the lack of data about the other cases which the paper did not cover, but that is not how i interact with science. A complete lack of data should never be the basis of your hypothesis.
The hardest part is that I was in New Zealand for the previous 7 months and decided to leave when the US announced they were closing borders (and forgot to mention they would remain open for citizens)
Hope you get well soon!
In most countries with successful quarantines, these people are regulated and tested, but for us it is kind of the opposite. These are people paid hourly and highly dependent upon a paycheck. It is an incentivized super-spreader paradigm if you think about it.
That's a perfectly sensible approach if you're in charge of a school or a retail business. There's a cost vs benefit and lost opportunity calculation.
In our personal lives, taking 1-3 minutes to wipe down all groceries isn't going to cause you to suddenly forget wearing a mask or staying home as much as possible, unless you have extremely bad executive functioning.
It is broken and we were just backpacking through southern hemisphere summer so we haven't bothered.