Cold symptoms positive?

[Tartan333]

I know there is a lot of discussion regarding the difference between cold symptoms and covid but has anyone or their dcs actually tested positive with purely cold type symptoms, snotty nose, sore throat, mild cough but no temperature or loss of taste/smell?

Could it be possible that the cold symptoms produced eg snotty nose, sore throat that so so many children have at the moment (probably due to limited contact in last 6months) be caused by another “normal” coronavirus and still be picked up on the Covid test producing a positive result?

Batsegundo, No, you are wrong. False positives are measured as a percentage of all the negatives.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020 Its a bit long, but you will find it in here. There is no definite consensus yet on false positive rate. Some say 2.5% right down 0.1% or less.

But false negatives are measured as a percentage of the positives.

@Treesofwood my reading of that is that we're both wrong (and please accept my apologies for my wrongness!). It seems to be saying the percentages of false positives and false negatives are given as a percentage of test numbers overall rather than as a percentage of the negatives?

Worryingly, the overall conclusion seems to be that we don't know enough about the rate of false positives or false negatives in operational testing in the UK. They're both a problem, the former especially when infection rates are low.

So in the Southwest, we probably have a bigger proportion of people who tested positive worried and isolating unnecessarily, but in the Northwest and Northeast the majority of those who have a positive test will be doing it for good reason.

And thanks for the link, I've been looking for good information on false positives and negatives but it's difficult to find. The only other information I've found suggested that the UK tests had near 100% specificity, hence my assumption that false positives must be extremely low.

@Tartan333

It's very confusing information. My dd now has quite a dry cough but still has a congested nose with no temperature.

My dd had a very runny nose, sneezing and a hoarse croaky voice. No temperature. After a couple of days she developed an occasional cough. Positive result.

The covid cough guidelines is 3 coughing episodes in 24 hours so it doesn’t have to be constant for a test.

Mippi thanks, that's interesting, hope your dd is ok, did it develop into anything else or was that the extent of it?

Yes will try and get a test now

That was it really, normal cold symptoms. Her throat/voice got better after about three days and runny nose after 4 or 5. She carried on with occasional coughs for about a week, initially kind of barky and became more chesty after a few days.