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Dr. Fauci reveals sure signs you have COVID-19 and you’re contagious

  • A coronavirus test can reveal the presence of the COVID-19 virus with pretty strong reliability, but there’s also one coronavirus test that can be used to determine whether or not a person is contagious with the virus.
  • Dr. Fauci says that antigen tests can be used to determine whether a person has enough of a COVID-19 viral load to be contagious to other people.
  • The other kind of test, a PCR test, is more accurate and takes longer to get results from.

One of the realities about the coronavirus pandemic we’ve been hearing so much about since the start of the crisis is the importance of separating ourselves from other people — maintaining a socially-distanced 6 feet in public, for example — because of the fact that COVID-19 can be spread by asymptomatic carriers. It’s one of the strangest realities, in fact, that’s associated with this destructive pathogen, the fact that the chasm between people at both extremes of the disease is so wide.

A coronavirus test reveals the presence of COVID-19, but it doesn’t explain why some people get infected with the virus and don’t appear to show any symptoms whatsoever. Other people, meanwhile, get infected and the virus utterly wrecks their body to the point of requiring a hospital stay — or, worse, ending in the patient’s death. This brings up an intriguing and potentially life-saving question: Is there a way to know if you’re contagious with COVID-19?


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White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed this during a talk a few days ago with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, under the banner of “COVID-19: Chasing Science to Save Lives.” Dr. Gupta moderated the discussion with Dr. Fauci, which was presented jointly by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine and hosted by The Forum at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The answer to this question of determining one’s contagiousness comes down to getting a coronavirus test, as well as the type of test that’s used.

PCR tests are regarded as being more accurate indicators of the presence of COVID-19. “If you’ve been exposed — either symptomatic or not — expensive PCR tests that you can’t get in 10 or 15 minutes, it’s going to (be) at best a day and sometimes two and three days,” Dr. Fauci explained. The length of time needed for the test results to be returned, in other words, speaks to their accuracy.

There’s another kind of test, a quicker one, which is good for determining contagiousness. These are called antigen tests, and Dr. Fauci says they’re a good way to “get a feel for what the penetrance of infection is in a particular group” of people. “If you get tested two or three times a week, the lack of sensitivity of that test will be made up for by the frequency with which you get it.

“Even though the sensitivity might be lower in the antigen test that’s more of a screening test, if you wind up getting a level of virus that is not picked up by the antigen test, because it’s so low, you could be infected, but your virus is so low that you are not infective. You’re not going to transmit it because it’s not picked up by the antigen test.”

In other words, while this isn’t the most accurate of the available coronavirus tests, if your viral load is so low that this test doesn’t pick it up, you can probably rest assured you won’t spread the virus to anyone else.

“I think that’s something we’re learning more and more about the more information we get, the more confident we’ll be as to whether or not these tests can be used on a basis of screening to tell you, at least I’m not infective to someone else,” Dr. Fauci said.


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