The only Covid vaccine I could take was the Johnson & Johnson all others had PEG (polyethylene glycol) as an inactive ingredient and I am seriously allergic to PEG. J & J has been taken of the market so no boosters.
So far I have managed to dodge Covid.
I did get sick last year sore throat, cough and home tested positive, tested again positive, so I go to the clinic and their lab test is negative. The DR says nope no Covid and gives me a prescription.
I don't remember what it was but go to the pharmacy and whatever he prescribed had PEG as an inactive ingredient .
If I do get Covid the majority of medications along with most OTC stuff has PEG so I am very limited in what I can take. Just have to keep trying to dodging the bullet and hope for the best should I do get Covid.
I wonder if others have false positives with the home test? I lost my faith in the home test.
Perhaps more than you want to know, but...
Under the best of conditions lateral flow tests, the common covid home tests are not perfect. In typical home use, much lower.
There is a large company that writes definitive summaries and reviews for medical and scientific researchers. I think that they are the best in the world, the Cochrane Organization. Here is a quote from their overview and evaluation of 152 studies of the accuracy of home Covid tests(antigen);
In people with confirmed COVID-19, antigen tests correctly identified COVID-19 infection in an average of 73% of people with symptoms, compared to 55% of people without symptoms. Tests were most accurate when used in the first week after symptoms began (an average of 82% of confirmed cases had positive antigen tests). This is likely to be because people have the most virus in their system in the first days after they are infected. For people with no symptoms, tests were most accurate in people likely to have been in contact with a case of COVID-19 infection (an average of 64% of confirmed cases had positive antigen tests).
(My bold)
www.cochrane.org
So, with symptoms, the probability is that there could be a one in four chance the test failed, but bear in mind that tests can fail positive (you don't have Covid, but the test says positive), and the tests can fail negative (you do have Covid, but the test says not). Lots of things can cause a test to fail from environmental things (dust, pollen, etc.) to blood or other organisms in the sample, to sampling issues (clumps of gunk, wrong part of the nose, sample too small, sample too large), and of course user error.
Not to throw anyone in particular under the bus, but watching my MIL try to do a test was hoot. She's not normally a fan of following directions, e.g. recipes, or being willing to read a user manual. My wife and I were both desperately holding in the giggles trying to shepherd her through a self test. Left to her own devices, I'd bet money that her test results would be zero percent accuracy for some large number of tries.
Pregnancy tests are much, much more accurate, in the high 98-99%, for a host of technical reasons, and billions of dollars of work.
All the best,
Peter