Hi, this is Your Health Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series.

We bring you the latest vital health news, discoveries that affect your body and your mind.

And we break down the medical research to help you stay healthy.

I'm Tanya Lewis.

I'm Josh Fisherman.

We're Scientific American senior health editors.

In today's episode, we want to talk about some of the current challenges

with using home COVID tests.

When you first have symptoms, a change in how your body reacts to the virus could lead to a

test result showing your negative when you're actually infected. you know how we try and give people easier ways to understand and use medical

research? Yeah simplifying complex science is kind of our job.

Well, today we're taking something that seems simple and we're going to say that it's actually more complicated now.

We're going to say that with COVID

home tests, the rapid antigen ones, it's become a little tougher to get an

accurate result. That's bad news, especially if like me you use those tests a lot.

You should still use them. They're very good at telling you if you have COVID.

But telling you that you don't have COVID, right, when you start to feel symptoms, that isn't as easy as it used to be.

You mean that it's possible to get what scientists call a false negative.

The tests might say you don't have COVID when you really do.

Yeah, that's what's going on here. You can still use the

test accurately, but it might take a few days to get a good answer. Back in the middle of the

pandemic, you would start to feel COVID symptoms, a sore throat, a runny nose, a fever, trouble breathing, and you'd reach for an antigen test that same day.

...