Maybe I am an idiot for not knowing this, but apparently PCR tests can be positive months after you got covid! I was supposed to go to China for grad school over two weeks ago, but the test I took before going came back positive, due to a super mild case of covid I got at the beginning of August. I guess it never occurred to me that it would still be positive so long afterwards – though now that I’ve actually looked it up, this is apparently very normal.
The sickness itself was a complete non-event for me. I had a slightly sore throat for three days. The quarantine was a much greater inconvenience (it took about a week until I was negative through the rapid antigen tests, 4 days of that week I was completely symptomless, yet couldn’t leave my room out of fear of getting my mom sick (she didn’t get sick)). I knew the PCR tests were more sensitive, but I figured they’d be positive like a week or two after the antigen tests went negative – not approaching two months!
China’s entry procedures require that if you have had a positive PCR test before (which I hadn’t before my initial planned departure, since I’d only done antigen tests) that you provide two negative PCR tests more than 24 hours apart, the second of which must be taken over 14 days before your flight. The test I took right before I was supposed to leave was over two weeks ago, so I took another one a week after that, which still came back positive. On Sunday (the 25th) I took a third test and it was negative! But then I took the second required test yesterday, and it came back positive – so I will once again wait a week (or maybe two weeks at this point) to take another, which means that, combined with the 10 days of isolation once I enter China (in Guangzhou) it won’t be until November at the earliest that I get to Shanghai (I’m going to grad school at Tongji).
This isn’t actually the worst thing in the world, because there are a handful of Chinese students who are in a similar situation to me due to limits on inter-city movement, so all of my classes are taping lectures and allowing people to participate remotely – but it’s very frustrating, and it’s highly likely that I’ll still be in America once all those students are in Shanghai, so there could very well be trouble in that regard. Also my visa requires that I enter before the beginning of December. Will I still be positive at the end of November? Who knows!
The worst part about this is how expensive each PCR test is. I don’t have insurance, because I quit my job to go to school in China! My savings were more than is necessary to get to China and go through quarantine there in order to cover the unexpected (once I’m actually in China I’ll get a stipend that covers living expenses from my scholarship), though now I’m worried I will blow through all of that taking tests every week here in the US. That one negative test was especially annoying, since if it were positive I wouldn’t have needed to take that additional test yesterday. In China PCR tests are like the equivalent of $4! Here, all the ones I’ve found have been over $100 a test if you’re uninsured and don’t actually have any symptoms or a referral.
The good news is that it has been way easier to understand math lectures in Chinese than I thought it would be (my major is math), so in terms of actual academics I’m not really worried. Hand-writing math stuff in Chinese for my homework is also pretty easy, since there’s a much smaller pool of characters involved than general subject matter writing, where I constantly have to stop and think about how to write a certain character, often typing it into my phone so I can see how it looks.
