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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

The one I have, you can use a red marker and lightly draw 2 lines in the space where they would appear if you have covid.

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It's even easier than that for the tests we have here in Eastern Canada.

You can spit a bit of cola or orange juice on it and it'll false positive. Rumor says that children are all aware of it and using this strategy to ditch school.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/it-s-not-the-real-thing-youth-tr...

Wow, middle school me would have abused the heck out of this.

Middle school you might have even wanted you to go to school, to see some other people than your close family.

(Most children of schoolage I knew in germany, after long lockdowns, think like that. Poor children, they have it so bad, they even want to go to school again..)

Middle school me would have made sure all the people I didn't like, knew about the trick so they could skip school and leave me in peace at school.

Exactly, these devices are meant for personal use. Why would you want to fiddle with the results?

I was wondering that... Potentially where the implications of quarantine are not as bad, as say, going to work? Or maybe to inconvenience someone?

Maybe insurance fraud? If you were somehow covered or wanted a refund on some travel. But again, I can't imagine a policy which explicitly covers COVID being beneficial for the underwriter.

To satisfy family members over Christmas.

"I'm sorry I can't join the family meal, I have tested positive"

You don't need a test to lie.

You don't have to send a doctor's note to your granny to skip holiday luncheon? That's just anarchical.

Yes but this way you only need to keep track of one lie instead of a bunch of lies, like the kind of covid test you took or when you took the test. More mental load to remember falsehoods than to remember truths. Or so I've heard.

>Exactly, these devices are meant for personal use. Why would you want to fiddle with the results?

My experience has been that you can at least get a day off depending on your organisation's policy or until you receive a negative result on a PCR confirmation test. Think perhaps about that business trip that you really don't want to make. I remember reading reports on schoolchildren coming up with chemical solutions (IIRC cola) to fake positive covid testing results in order to skip school. A slightly "techier" covid testing product like the one from the article might placate a more suspicious employer.

In some areas, testing positive means paid leave.

Here, such devices are used for testing kids at basic school. I heard a story from one of our managers that some kid in his kids' class wanted to fake his test to read positive (to evade school duties) so he used a pen marker however this attempt was discovered :-)

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