Post-A&E Infection Check
On Wednesday my wife, our dogs and I were due to go for an evening walk with a friend and her dog. Shared activity is less likely to transmit airborne disease outdoors than indoors, but transmission can still occur.
Last Friday my wife and I had a whopping potential exposure to COVID (and who knows what else) at A&E. Before the walk Wednesday, we did a pooled COVID test with the PlusLife machine she got. My wife is in charge of the PlusLife machine, so she’s the one who knows the most about what it can do and how to use it.
Pooled tests are a cool feature. We both swabbed. The swabs went into one test kit and ran through the test together. With the high accuracy of PlusLife, if our pooled test came in negative, we could be 98% certain we weren’t going to expose our friend and her dog to COVID.
My wife also tried the PlusLife Analyzer software for the first time. It’s unofficial, so it shouldn’t be relied upon for medical purposes. But it can show early indications of an oncoming COVID infection that hasn’t yet reached the threshold for the positive-test indicator light on the machine.
To do this, the PC running the PlusLife software has to be connected to the test machine. My wife used a USB cable.
We were concentrating on doing the test and didn’t want to disturb the test setup, so we didn’t get screen captures from the PC. Instead, I only have snapshots taken with my phone. (Sorry about that.) At the top of this post you can see how the Analyzer looks when it is ready to start.
We initiated the test in the machine before telling the software what we were doing. We chose the type of test from the drop-down selector. The software then recognized that a test was in progress. We clicked a button to acknowledge that we wanted it to show us that test as it proceeded.
The Analyzer told us when to expect test results to come in. Then it began to plot what the machine was finding.
This is exactly what we hoped to see. One test channel should be much higher than the others. It’s the Control channel for comparison. If we don’t have COVID, the other test channels should all be much lower.
As the test continued, the Control channel went even higher compared with the others. The scale of the plot automatically changed to accommodate the data.
When the test finished running, the machine beeped as usual and showed us the blessed negative indicator light, just as it did for our friend last week (and for me last Friday before our A&E adventure, when I was checking whether SARS-CoV-2 got past my respirator during my long flight). The Analyzer also showed a negative test result and displayed details of the test run.
With the Analyzer, we could see whether any of the test channels were higher than they should be. A test channel suspiciously high would suggest one or both of us (because it was a pooled test) might be coming down with COVID but not yet have a high enough viral load to count as a positive test result. We would be able to be proactive—stay at home, isolate from each other and wear masks downstairs where the dogs live and in common areas.
This relieves some uncertainty and anxiety. We are glad we got the machine and we’ll be happy to provide access to it for family and friends around us.
Nobody is more careful than you! Glad you both are ok!
I am so very happy you're both negative, Bonnie. Such great news!