COVID-19 has been around long enough that we are not even counting the waves anymore, but the virus and the tools we have to fight it keep evolving.
And the guidance seems to change just enough with each surge that it can leave even the most diligent among us feeling lost.
Now, more than two years into the pandemic, some parts of the U.S. are seeing an uptick in cases driven by the BA.2 subvariant.
Dr. Celine Gounder is a senior fellow and editor-at-large for public health at Kaiser Health News and a former adviser to the Biden administration. She runs through the latest thinking on everything from at-home tests to isolation times, contact tracing and why we may be repeating the same mistakes we made with other diseases.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
On whether the rapid at-home tests work for BA.2
The rapid antigen tests do work to pick up omicron. This pattern that you see is really similar across all the variants, which is that there is usually a day or two delay between when you might test positive on a PCR versus when you might test positive on one of these at-home rapid antigen tests. But they do work to pick up an infection.