Originally Posted by skywatch

A desperate industry looking for anything to get people to fly again, to be sure - but this is not it. The CDC does not recommend testing to end quarantine and says that you could continue to test positive on a PCR for up to three months after your infection - "Recovered persons can continue to shed detectable SARS-CoV-2 RNA in upper respiratory specimens for up to 3 months after illness onset, albeit at concentrations considerably lower than during illness, in ranges where replication-competent virus has not been reliably recovered and infectiousness is unlikely." "Thus, for persons recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection, a positive PCR without new symptoms during the 90 days after illness onset more likely represents persistent shedding of viral RNA than reinfection" https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...isolation.html

Bottom line – “Probability of culturing virus declines to 8% in samples with Ct > 35 (NCBI.nih.gov) and to 6% 10 days after onset”. In the US, “Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus.” (NYT and other sources)

So am I going to schedule a vacation and fly out of the country knowing that I could be sitting in Mexico unable to test negative for up to THREE MONTHS? And potentially putting my entire schedule/life dependent on a decreasingly accurate PCR test? All to detect if I have a shred of DNA of a virus that I am nowhere near contagious or sick from? Doubtful.