For those playing along at home, I finally tested negative this afternoon (Saturday)

@Conflux Congrats!

Well, I guess the market predicted my scenario well in the end, although badly in the beginning. I got a faint-line positive. This test was iHealth, which is a brand I haven’t used during this covid case.

I genuinely don’t think I’d be endangering people by returning to school, given that I’ve barely have symptoms for days. (Although I was coughing a bit last night.) Also, I think you’re less infectious toward the end anyway. However, I understand why they have the negative test rule in place. I’m staying positive, in more ways than one.

@Conflux are you going to zoom into the event?

@cloe I think so!

Looked into this back when I had covid - this was the most useful chart I found on the subject, low sample size but all the reading I did back then indicated that 7 days is optimistic for N-antigen tests.

If you're curious - here's what my tests looked like when I had Covid where test line darkness is normalized against the white area of the test and plotted over time:

Definitely making a bit of a bet that your faint line was a bad sample/test/etc here :) And also depends on which brand of test you'll be using in the future. But my experience and reading I've done makes me think that 40% is a lot closer than 50% for the odds that your test tomorrow is negative.

Links to markets for Thursday and Friday:

So the test I took this morning was also pretty clearly positive - the line definitely appeared quickly and is not faint.

Maybe worth noting that this test and the other test that gave me a clear negative two days ago was BinaxNow brand, whereas the test with the faint line yesterday afternoon was iHealth. I don't really know if I should expect that to be a coincidence.

Still no symptoms anymore basically.

@Conflux Edit: It wasn’t iHealth, it was InteliSwab. Still a different brand

Took another test. Positive, but the line’s pretty faint! Not sure about tomorrow, optimistic for Wednesday.

I might take a test later today. I’m feeling basically back to normal. I felt weirdly in the mood to do household chores this morning, so I did various household chores and also made myself an omelette (didn’t end up pretty, but still functional).

@Conflux Alas, I’m still testing positive.

I feel like I’m continuing to recover and regain energy. Went on a ~45m walk today

@Conflux also have been blowing my nose less

I added a subsidy of M$500 since I’m curious about the answer obviously. Might subsidize more

I ran a similar question when I got covid and here's a link to my research, which is admittedly nearly a year old and may not be the most accurate/current. Based on it, I would guesstimate 70% probability for your question.

Some articles/studies I found say duration of Omicron infection (counting from first detection) is about 10 days mean, 5 days median. Which would suggest a distribution with a fairly long right tail. (Although I don't fully trust the reporting, I could not actually find where in the study the numbers came from and the study is looking at a couple different groups and metrics).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/01/19/new-data-suggests-that-50-of-omicron-infections-in-healthy-young-men-remain-transmissible-after-five-days/?sh=1dc8a45d1fa9 and paper https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.13.22269257v2.full-text

This article https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o922 says Omicron symptoms lasted 7 days on average.

https://manifold.markets/jack/how-many-days-will-my-covid-infecti#EURz4PrlBGs8QAVTe5Fy

@jack 10 days mean?? wow

@Conflux Yeah, surprised me too. Note that the second study above found a mean of 7 days, so it's probably in between.

@jack that would probably be affected by age though, right?

@DylanSlagh Yeah, quite possibly. I didn't have any data on that though.

feel better covid sucks

Bro you better