Month: April 2022

Home Antigen Tests Aren’t Useful For Covid Screening

Epistemic status: I strongly believe this is the right conclusion given the available data. The best available data is not that good, and if better data comes out I reserve the right to change my opinion.

EDIT (4/27): In a development I consider deeply frustrating but probably ultimately good, the same office is now getting much more useful information from antigen tests. They aren’t tracking with same rigor so I can’t comapre results, but they are now beating the bar of “literally ever noticing covid”.

In an attempt to avoid covid without being miserable, many of my friends are hosting group events but requiring attendees to take a home covid test beforehand. Based on data from a medium-sized office, I believe testing for covid with the tests people are using, to be security theater and provide no decrease in risk. Antigen tests don’t work for covid screening. There is a more expensive home test available that provides some value, and rapid PCR may still be viable.

It’s important to distinguish between test types here: antigen tests look for viral proteins, and genetic amplification tests amplify viral RNA until it reaches detectable levels. The latter are much more sensitive. Most home tests are antigen tests, with the exception of Cue, which uses NAAT (a type of genetic amplification). An office in the bay area used aggressive testing with both Cue and antigen tests to control covid in the office and kept meticulous notes, which they were kind enough to share with me. Here are the aggregated numbers: 

  • The office requested daily Cue tests from workers. I don’t know how many people this ultimately included, probably low hundreds? I expect compliance was >95% but not perfect.
    • The results are from January when the dominant strain was Omicron classic, but no one got strain tested.
  • 39 people had at least one positive Cue test, all of which were either asymptomatic or ambiguously symptomatic (e.g. symptoms could be explained by allergies) at the time, and 27 of which had recent negative cue tests (often but not always the day before, sometimes the same day)
  • Of these, 10 definitely went on to develop symptoms, 7 definitely did not, and 18 were ambiguous (and a few were missing data).
  • 33 people with positives were retested with cue tests, of which 9 were positive. 
  • Of those 24 who tested positive and then negative, 4 tested positive on tests 3 or 4.
  • Of the 20 people with a single positive test followed by multiple negative retests, 6 went on to develop symptoms.
  • 0 people tested positive on antigen tests. There was not a single positive antigen test across this group. They not only didn’t catch covid as early as Cue did, they did not catch any cases at all, including at least 2 people who took the tests while experiencing definitive systems.
    • Antigen tests were a mix of Binax and QuickVue.
    • Early cases took multiple antigen tests over several days, later cases stopped bothering entirely.
    • The “negative test while symptomatic” count is artificially low because I excluded people with ambiguous symptoms, and because later infectees didn’t bother with antigen tests. 
    • I suppose I can’t rule out the possibility that they had an unrelated disease with similar symptoms and a false positive on the Cue test. But it seems unlikely that that happened 10-28 times out a few hundred people without leaving other evidence.

A common defense of antigen tests is that they detect whether you’re contagious at that moment, not whether you will eventually become contagious. Given the existence of people who tested antigen-negative while Cue-positive and symptomatic, I can’t take that seriously.

Unfortunately Cue tests are very expensive. You need a dedicated reader, which is $250, and tests are $65 each (some discount if you sign up for a subscription). A reader can only run 1 test at a time and each test takes 30 minutes, so you need a lot for large gatherings even if people stagger their entrances. 

My contact’s best guess is that the aggressive testing reduced but did not eliminate in-office spread, but it’s hard to quantify because any given case could have been caught outside the office, and because they were trying so many interventions at once. Multiple people tested positive, took a second test right away, and got a negative result, some of whom went on to develop symptoms; we should probably assume the same chance of someone testing negative when a second test would have come back positive, and some of those would have been true positives. So even extremely aggressive testing has gaps.

Meanwhile, have I mentioned lately how good open windows and air purifiers are for covid? And other illnesses, and pollution? And that taping a HEPA filter to a box fan is a reasonable substitute for an air purifier achievable for a very small number of dollars? Have you changed your filter recently? 

PS. Before you throw your antigen tests out, note that they are more useful than Cue tests for determining if you’re over covid. Like PCR, NAAT can continue to pick up dead RNA for days, maybe weeks, after you have cleared the infection. A negative antigen test after symptoms have abated and there has been at least one positive test is still useful evidence to me. 

PPS. I went through some notes and back in September I estimated that antigen testing would catch 25-70% of presymptomatic covid cases. Omicron moves faster, maybe faster enough that 25% was reasonable for delta, but 70% looks obviously too high now. 

PPPS. Talked to another person at the office, their take is the Cue tests are oversensitive. I think this fits the data worse but feel obliged to pass it on since they were there and I wasn’t.

PPPPS (5/02): multiple people responded across platforms that they had gotten positive antigen tests. One or two of these was even presymptomatic. I acknowledge the existence proof but will not be updating until the data has a denominator. If you’re doing a large event like a conference I encourage you to give everyone both cue, antigen, and rapid PCR tests and record their results, and who eventually gets sick. If you’d like help designing this experiment in more detail please reach out (elizabeth-at-acesounderglass.com)

I Caught Covid And All I Got Was This Lousy Ambiguous Data

Tl;dr I tried to run an n of 1 study on niacin and covid, and it failed to confirm or disprove anything at all.

You may remember that back in October I published a very long post investigating a niacin-based treatment protocol for long covid. My overall conclusion was “seems promising but not a slam dunk; I expect more rigorous investigation to show nothing but we should definitely check”. 

Well recently I got covid and had run out of more productive things I was capable of doing, so decided to test the niacin theory. I learned nothing but it was a lot of effort and I deserve a blog post out of it null results are still results so I’m sharing anyway.

Background On Niacin

Niacin is a B-vitamin used in a ton of metabolic processes. If you’re really curious, I describe it in excruciating detail in the original post.

All B vitamins are water-soluble, and it is generaly believed that unless you take unbelievably stupid doses you will pee out any excess intake without noticing. It’s much harder to build up stores of water-soluble vitamins than fat vitamins, so you need a more regular supply.  Niacin is a little weird among the water-solubles in that it gives very obvious signs of overdose: called flush, the symptoms consist of itchy skin and feeling overheated. Large doses can lead to uncontrolled shaking, but why would you ever take that much, when it’s so easy to avoid?

People regularly report response patterns that sure look like their body has a store of niacin that can be depleted and refilled over time. A dose someone has been taking for weeks or months will suddenly start giving them flush, and if they don’t lower it the flush symptoms will get worse and worse. 

Some forms of niacin don’t produce flush. Open question if those offer the same benefits with no side effects, offer fewer benefits, or are completely useless.

Niacin And Long Covid

There’s an elaborate hypothesis about how covid depletes niacin (and downstream products), and this is a contributor to long covid. My full analysis is here. As of last year I hadn’t had covid (this is antibody test confirmed, I definitely didn’t have an asymptomatic case) but I did have lingering symptoms from my vaccine and not a lot else to try, so I gave the protocol a shot.

My experience was pretty consistent with the niacin-storage theory. I spent a long time at quite a high dose of the form of niacin the protocol recommends, nictonic acid. My peak dose without flush was at  least 250mg (1563% RDA) and maybe even 375mg (2345% RDA). When I hit my limit I lowered my dose until I started getting flush at the new dose, and eventually went off nicotnic acid entirely (although I restarted a B-vitamin that included 313% RDA of a different form). That ended in September or early October 2021. It made no difference in my lingering vaccine symptoms.

In early 2022 I tried nicotinic acid again. Even ¼ tablet (62.5mg, 390% RDA) gave me flush.

I Get Covid

Once I developed symptoms and had done all the more obviously useful things like getting Paxlovid, I decided it would be fun to test myself with niacin (and the rest of the supplement stack discussed in my post) and see if covid had any effect. So during my two weeks of illness and week of recovery I occasionally took nicotinic acid and recorded my results. Here’s the overall timeline:

  1. Day -2: am exposed to covid.
  2. Day 0: test positive on a cue test (a home test that uses genetic amplification).
    1. Lung capacity test: 470 (over 400 is considered health).
    2. Start Fluvamoxine and the vitamin cocktail, although I’m inconsistent with both the new and existing vitamins during the worst of the illness. Vitamin cocktail includes 313% RDA of no-flush niacin, but not nicotinic acid. 
  3. Day 1: symptomatic AF. 102.3 degree fever, awake only long enough to pee, refill my water, and make sure my O2 saturation isn’t going to kill me. I eat nothing the entire day.
    1. I monitored my O2 throughout this adventure but it never went into a dangerous zone so I’m leaving it out of the rest of the story.
  4. Day 2: start with 99 degree fever, end day with no fever. Start Paxlovid.
    1. Every day after this I am awake a little bit longer, eat a little bit more, and have a little more cognitive energy, although it takes a while to get back to normal. 
    2. Try ¼ tab nicotinic acid (62.5 mg/ 375% RDA), no flush.
    3. Lung capacity troughs at 350 (considered orange zone).
  5. Day 4: ½ tablet nictonic acid, mild flush.
  6. Day 7: lung capacity up to 450, it will continue to vary from 430-450 for the next two weeks before occasionally going higher.
  7. Day 9: ½ tablet nictonic acid, mild flush
  8. Day 10-17: ⅓ tablet nictonic acid, no flush
    1. Where by “⅓” tablet I mean “I bit off an amount of pill that was definitely >¼ and <½ and probably averaged to ~⅓ over time”
  9. Day 12: I test positive on a home antigen test
  10. Day 15: I test negative on a home antigen test (no tests in between) 
  11. Day 17: ⅓ tablet produces flush (and a second negative antigen test)
    1. This was also the first day I left my house. I had thought of myself as still prone to fatigue but ended up having a lot of energy once I got out of my house and have been pretty okay since.

Conclusions

My case of covid was about as bad as you get while still technically counting as mild. Assuming I went into it with niacin stores such that 62.5mg nicotinic acid would generate flush, it looks like covid immediately took a small bite out of them. Or it reduced my absorption of vitamins, such that the same oral dosage resulted in less niacin being taken in. There’s no way to know covid had a larger effect on niacin than other illnesses, because I don’t have any to compare it to. Or maybe the whole thing was an artifact of “not eating for two days, and then only barely, and being inconsistent with my vitamins for a week”.