With serious illness related to Coronavirus running rampant in the country right now, also running rampant are people with mild symptoms or even no symptoms. Many people are screening positive – maybe testing purely as a result of an exposure or as part of a screening program. What do you do if you screen positive?
Well no one knows for sure. But the best data says treat yourself as if you are sick. You in fact do have SARS-CoV2 in your system and are in fact producing contagious viral particles in your nose. You can spread the disease and cause serious harm to others if you are not isolating.
But what can you do to stay safe yourself? In addition to isolating away from others and N95 masking when necessary contacts must happen, there are two medicines you should consider:
The first is Aspirin. 81mg of aspirin daily recently was reported to improve outcomes and symptoms in a small study. This makes sense as many of the COVID problems are related to blood vessel inflammation and clotting. For those not allergic and able to take NSAIDs, I recommend taking a simple baby aspirin daily for one month following your COVID diagnosis.
The second recommendation is Vitamin C. Vitamin C has some evidence that it can shorten a viral illness if taken before someone gets sick. 2,000mg Daily of Vitamin C from a reputable maker is probably worthwhile taking.
Raise the temperature in your home or office space. Studies have shown that survival of SARS-CoV2 on surfaces is impaired by warm air and higher humidity. If possible, raise the temp a little, use a humidifier (in the winter) and run quality HEPA air filtration. These efforts should reduce the survival of airborne or surface-level viral particles.
Stay hydrated, monitor your temperature and take care of yourself. Hopefully you remain one of the lucky ones who experiences no illness, but stay on top of your symptoms. If you become sick then the isolation clock restarts and you should be isolating at least 10 days from when your symptoms developed.
Healthcare workers who screen positive for coronavirus but have no symptoms should remain out of work for 10 days OR pass two serial COVID-19 PCR tests. Meaning you can shorten your isolation period, if not having symptoms, if you return to testing and get two good negative tests at least 24 hours apart. Example: If Day 1 you test positive. Then Day 4 You test negative and then Day 5 you test negative you may free self from isolation. These negative tests should be the gold standard nasopharyngeal PCR swab taken from both nasal passages to be sure. This may save you a day or two of isolating, but is pretty difficult to accomplish all those tests.
Thank Dr. Rogers for this content, we have been getting a lot of calls and questions lately to the Facebook page and front desk about this very question!
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