Responding to my “how contagious am I?” post, reader Bob Woolley writes that what I hoped for — a home test that would “somehow objectively measure just how contagious one is likely to be — perhaps some sort of quickie home saliva test or some such” is unlikely to be available soon. But here’s what he suggests:
But you have a pretty good qualitative assessment built in: your level of contagion (for ordinary colds, anyway) is proportionate to the amount of (pardon me) goo you’re producing. The virus wants nothing other than to reproduce and spread itself. It does this by stimulating the formation of respiratory mucus loaded with copies of the virus, and by stimulating coughing and sneezing, to disperse droplets of that mucus. You could probably make a decent gauge of a person’s infectiousness by weighing the used tissues produced in an hour. . . .
He also wrote that this still holds true even when one’s goo output is reduced by taking cold remedies:
To whatever extent they reduce goo production and expelling, they reduce your contagiousness. . . .
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