Hi there - first time poster, looking for some advice on when to end isolation!
My wife came back from a trip feeling "kinda flu-y" a couple weeks ago and tested positive the moment she got home. This was her first time getting it, and she's Type 1 Diabetic so I insisted on her getting a course of Paxlovid, which greatly reduced her symptoms and took her from "mild case" symptoms to totally symptom-free within the course of a few days. We wanted to wait a week to watch out for rebound so we waited a week to test - she tested negative 2 days in a row on RATs, but when we both got PCRs a day after the second negative test (about 2 weeks in at that point), she came back positive.
We've been good at keeping up with quarantine strategies - her in isolation, both of us masked anywhere, CR boxes, open windows, you name it. I'm a suspected Covid long-hauler (never tested positive but was really sick with bad post-infection symptoms, and check a lot of the cardiovascular-related boxes for LC), so neither of us want her giving it to me, but... At some point she has to stop being infectious, right?
There's a lot of mixed messaging out there on PCRs - I see a lot of insisting that a negative PCR is the only way to test out of isolation, but the fact that a PCR can still detect dead virus material months after someone stops being infectious is contradictory to that. We still have RATs to test her on, and was finally able to buy a Metrix reader and tests (still waiting a couple more days in the mail on those), but I understand that the Metrix can also test positive on dead material since it's a similar sensitivity to a PCR test. I'm also finally getting the updated vaccine tomorrow, so that should be an extra layer of protection, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if my abundance of caution is becoming an overabundance of caution.
TLDR: Wife tested negative on RAT but positive on PCR 2 weeks after first positive test, how do we determine she's safe to leave isolation without the risk of getting me (long-hauler husband) sick again?
Thank you in advance for any feedback or advice! I just need some sort of reassurance that we're doing the right things, and this is going to end at some point!