Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn?t Be.

But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive.“The decision not to test asymptomatic people is just really backward,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, referring to the C.D.C. recommendation.“In fact, we should be ramping up testing of all different people,” he said, “but we have to do it through whole different mechanisms.”In what may be a step in this direction, the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would purchase 150 million rapid tests.The most widely used diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, called a PCR test, provides a simple yes-no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected.But similar PCR tests for other viruses do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient’s body.“We’ve been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus — that’s all,” Dr. Mina said. A spokeswoman for the lab said testers did not have access to the precise numbers.This amounts to an enormous missed opportunity to learn more about the disease, some experts said.“It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests — that they’re just returning a positive or a negative,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York.“It would be useful information to know if somebody’s positive, whether they have a high viral load or a low viral load,” she added.Updated August 27, 2020Officials at the Wadsworth Center, New York’s state lab, have access to C.T. values from tests they have processed, and analyzed their numbers at The Times’s request.