As a science journalist, I’ve read dozens of research papers
about COVID-19, and I’ve interviewed so many virus experts, infectious disease
physicians and immunologists over the past two years that I’ve lost count. But
nothing prepared me for what happened after my 7-year-old daughter tested
positive for
COVID-19 nearly two weeks ago.
اضافة اعلان
It started the way you might expect: On a Sunday evening, my
daughter spiked a fever. The next morning, we got an email informing us that
she’d been exposed to the coronavirus Friday at school. I gave her a rapid
antigen test, which quickly lit up positive. I resigned myself to the
possibility that the whole family was, finally, going to get COVID-19.
But we didn’t — not exactly. I, for one, never developed
symptoms or tested positive. On the day my daughter first tested positive, my
11-year-old son announced that he wasn’t feeling well and began developing
classic coronavirus symptoms: headache, fatigue, sore throat, runny nose. My
husband followed two days later with a sore throat and stuffy nose. Yet despite
testing daily for seven days straight, my husband and son never tested positive
for COVID-19 — including on PCR tests administered on my son’s fifth day of
symptoms and my husband’s third. (And yes, we did some throat swabs, too.)
We racked our brains as to what might have happened: Did my
husband and son get COVID, even though they never tested positive? Or did they
have another virus that caused identical symptoms and happened to infect them
right after they were exposed to COVID-19? (Our pediatrician said that was
unlikely.) Why hadn’t I gotten sick at all? I called experts in immunology,
microbiology and virology to get their take.
Vaccination changes how your body reacts to the virus.
One of the first questions experts asked me was whether my
family was vaccinated. Yes, I said: My husband and I are vaccinated and
boosted, and our kids are vaccinated but not yet boosted. This is a relevant
question because, if you’re exposed to the virus that causes COVID-19, “your
immune system kicks into action a lot faster if you’re vaccinated versus not
vaccinated,” said Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security in Baltimore. And this rapid response changes everything
about what happens next.
First, the swift immune reaction slows the rate of viral
reproduction and spread. “This is what the vaccines are there for — to educate
your immune system so that it gets a jump on the invaders before they are able
to replicate out of control,” Gronvall said. Because the virus doesn’t
replicate as quickly in vaccinated people, they may be less likely to test
positive for COVID-19 after coronavirus exposure, because their immune system
“keeps the viral load below the level of detection,” said Juliet Morrison, a
microbiologist at the University of California, Riverside.
It’s possible, then, that my husband and son did catch COVID-19,
but their vaccinated immune systems fended off the infection so well that they
never had enough viral proteins in their nose or throat to test positive. And
their negative tests probably meant that they were never that contagious,
Morrison said.
Still, my husband and son followed the guidelines from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which say that if you’re
vaccinated, have been exposed to COVID-19 and develop symptoms but test
negative, you should continue to wear a mask around others for 10 days. In
fact, everyone in the house who was symptomatic stayed out of public for seven
days. I ran a few errands but wore an N95 or KF94 mask when I did, in case I
was incubating an infection.
To reduce spread between family members, we opened the windows,
ate outdoors and wore masks around each other when we remembered — but I’ll be
honest and admit that our precautions relaxed after several days, especially
once my husband and son developed symptoms, too.
You can feel sick even if the virus is under control.
If my husband and son never tested positive, why did they feel
sick? Even if a vaccinated person doesn’t have much virus in their body, they
can still have powerful COVID symptoms, the experts told me. That’s because
many illness symptoms — fever, malaise, runny nose, fatigue — are actually
caused by the immune system’s response to the virus, rather than the virus
itself, Gronvall said.
And as for why I felt fine, Morrison said that perhaps my immune
system fought off the incoming virus so quickly that I didn’t even have a
chance to feel sick.
“It sounds to me like you were definitely exposed,” Morrison
told me. But, she explained, maybe I had high levels of vaccine antibodies or
immune cells called T cells that were able to kill the invading virus before it
had a chance to alert the parts of my immune system that would incite symptoms.
All this said, nobody really knows what happened to me, my son
or my husband.
When it comes to understanding how COVID-19 affects the body,
“there are so many open questions,” said Raul Andino, a virus expert at the
University of California, San Francisco, and people can have different
experiences for many different reasons. For instance, Andino said, it’s
possible that the virus was replicating in parts of my husband’s or my son’s
body that the tests didn’t reach. Research suggests that the coronavirus can
replicate in the pancreas, heart, brain, kidneys and other organs, although
vaccination may reduce the chance that the virus spreads outside the
respiratory system.
My family is not the only one that has had the bizarre
experience of developing coronavirus symptoms but repeatedly testing negative.
Andino said that he and his colleagues have been conducting studies in which
they follow and repeatedly test entire households after one person in the home
tests positive for COVID-19.
“What we see is exactly what you described — that some people in
the household don’t test positive,” even though they have symptoms, he said.
When I asked my Instagram followers if they’d had an experience like my
family’s, I got dozens of “yes” replies and stories that sounded a lot like
ours.
Most people with COVID-19 exposure and symptoms will test
positive, eventually.
The experts I talked to also made a really important point:
There’s a difference between never testing positive and not yet testing
positive. My husband and son continued to test themselves for a week after
developing symptoms, so my sources said it was unlikely they were ever going to
test positive. But many people only test for a couple of days and,
frustratingly, you can’t make clear conclusions from just a couple of negative
tests.
As I said earlier, when people are vaccinated against COVID-19,
their immune systems are primed to fight it quickly, and they often develop
symptoms earlier than unvaccinated people do — a few days before they can test
positive. So when people only test a few days after developing symptoms, their
negative results don’t necessarily mean they don’t have COVID-19. Yet some
people assume at that point that they don’t have the coronavirus and stop
taking precautions.
“They may relax mitigation measures when they are still shedding
quite a bit of virus,” Gronvall said.
Given these findings, Gronvall said that, ideally, people who
have had two or three vaccine doses should test once they start developing
symptoms but continue to test on Day 4 or 5 of symptoms, as tests that come
back negative before then may be falsely reassuring. To do this, however, you
need to have access to lots of tests. Thankfully, you can now get a third round
of free COVID-19 tests through the U.S. government, and there may be free
testing sites near you, too.
As for our family, everyone has now fully recovered. The mystery
of what transpired in our home continues to eat at me, but it’s far outweighed
by my relief that we had such a mild experience — and for this, we have our
COVID-19 vaccines to thank.
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