Comment on Can a COVID test show your level of infectiousness?
DrabPoultry@midwest.social 5 days ago
A home test won’t. A PCR gives you some idea if you can get them to tell you the CT (cycle threshold) value of your test. The CT value corresponds to how many times the temperature cycled before the amplification signal of the sample became detectable. Lower CT values correspond to higher viral loads.
elvith@feddit.org 5 days ago
Even then, the CT roughly indicates the amount of virus that was in the sample - which correlates with how infectious you are. But it also depends on the quality of the sample and how it was taken. If you’re highly infectious but the slab was not correctly inserted, you might have less virus on your sample as one would expect and appear less infectious.
DrabPoultry@midwest.social 4 days ago
Definitely. Plus, you can absolutely get different CT values from two different testing platforms. Some PCR tests are more hands-on than others and the result can vary based on the quality of processing and on the settings that are used in the analysis software.