How can you miss the window test positive on a sickness?
In: Biology
You can recover. If you get a disease and then don’t get tested for a couple of weeks then your body may have developed antibodies to handle it. If you get a test for an active virus then, it will turn out negative. That’s why they have separate serology tests that say “You have immunity to chicken pox, you either had it or had got a vaccine”. Those aren’t the same tests as are used to detect if you have a disease right now.
Some tests are based on detecting the antibodies you produce in response to the thing that’s causing the disease. So you can be infected, but your body may have not produced antibodies yet, and your test will be negative. This may vary between patients (for example, a person that has immunity problems could respond slower) and diseases (like, the fast test to COVID-19 takes 3-5 days after initial symptoms to positivate. The HIV immunological test may positivate after 2 months of the infection).
Edit: some of those immunological tests may stay positive even long after you are cured from the disease. There are basically two types of antibodies: the IgM which is the first antibody that you produce. It is like a “toddler” antibody, because it is less specific for the pathogen. This one stops being produced to “evolve” to the other one, the IgG, the “old” antibody, that can protect you from future infections.
So it is expected in acute infection you may find IgM+ and in immunity you find IgG+.
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