Celebrities have definitely done it, and maybe you’ve done it too: Get a COVID-19 test and if it’s negative, go on vacation with your closest friends.
Experts warn that this is not a good idea. That's because a negative COVID-19 test only says so much. Whether the test correctly identifies you as uninfected depends on the kind of test you were given, how well the test was administered, and what you’ve been doing (and who you’ve seen) recently.
So, a negative test result by itself is not a “get out of jail free card,” says Mary K. Hayden, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at Rush University Medical Center.
For starters, there are dozens of COVID-19 tests out there, and each technology comes with different likelihoods of providing an incorrect diagnosis. False negatives — or a test that says you don’t have the virus when you actually are ...
