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If you’re following the news on COVID-19 testing, you may have heard the debate about RT-PCR testing and Ct values leading to false positive results. You may be wondering “How does PCR work, what makes it RT, and what the heck is a Ct value?” A #SciCommSunday primer.
I’m actually going to start by making things a bit more complicated, but stay with me – this will help in the long run. The “RT-PCR” test is really an RT-qPCR test, and the “q” is what is at the center of the debate.
So, what do all of those letters mean? To answer that, we have to look at a different set of letters. Every virus has what is called a genome – this is the code that carries all of the instructions it needs to infect a cell and get that cell to make more copies of the virus.
You may have heard about the massive number of COVID-19 tests being run as colleges try to bring students back to campus. These “rapid” antigen tests provide results in 15 min, but how does that work and is it as good as the RT-PCR test? A #SciCommSunday thread.
Let’s start by taking a look at the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – that’s the virus that causes COVID-19. The virus has an outer shell made up of different proteins and that surrounds a molecule called RNA. 
The RNA molecule carries all of the instructions needed to make the proteins, and that is how a virus can hijack the machinery of your cells to make more copies of itself and cause an infection to spread throughout your body.
