Free at-home COVID tests are arriving in mailboxes across the country…if you haven’t signed up for yours yet, USA Today will tell you how to do it.
Is there a better time of the day to get tested?
Turns out there is…researchers at Vanderbilt found they tend to be more accurate in the afternoon than at morning or night.
People were TWICE as likely to have an accurate positive test result if they tested themselves in the middle of the day.
Why the afternoon?
They think the virus behaves differently depending on which stage of your circadian rhythm you’re in, like other viruses, and you produce more of them in the middle of the day, so there’s more of the virus for tests to detect.
False positives COVID test are pretty rare in general, so this is more about false negatives, where you do have COVID but the test says you don’t.
If you’re still not sure after a home test, you should get a PCR test at the Shops at Ithaca Mall or through your physician.
