As at-home rapid tests enter the market, remember that ânegativeâ doesnât always mean negative.
A doctor sanitized between administering Covid-19 tests at a mobile testing unit in Sacramento.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times
Dec. 23, 2020
Since the start of the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration has issued emergency green lights to more than 200 types of coronavirus tests, each with its own curiosities and quirks. Yet we tend to talk about all of them in the same binary way, with identical terms: positive, negative, true, false.
But when it comes to interpreting results, not all positives and negatives are equally reliable. Factors like whether you had symptoms, or the number of people in your neighborhood who are infected, can influence how confident you should be in your results.