C for??

 Cooooooovid. 

Yep. And this attitude led to biiiiiiiiiiig mess up at home yesterday. 

Chiyaa came back from school yesterday with a headache. Her face was all droopy and her teacher recommended getting her tested. The school has been sending emails that headaches, an upset tummy and puking are some of the complaints kids had before testing positive for Covid-19. Since she had a headache we got the home test kit out to test her. 

Now the test kit works like a home pregnancy test. You take a swab, mix it in a solution, put the solution in the kit and wait for the die to come to a certain point. The two points that are marked in the testing kit are a C and a T. Chiyaa asked what does C mean and the  tester in charger Mr K responded "C for Covid." "What does T mean?", asked Chiyaa. "Err I dunno, but C is what we care about" came the prompt reply from the person who doesn't believe in reading instructions. So we tested her and it went up to a C. She started crying. Children are very deeply impacted by the diagnosis because they have heard and seen all sort of glum stories about the disease. They are yet to realise that the disease is highly endemic now and also here to stay. She started crying and seeing her so did Pumpki. She was really worried for her elder sister. In all crying and sobbing it was very hard to take the test on her. Somehow we managed. We all got our "C"s. Now a 5/5 on the tests had me all perplexed. What are the odds. Then I searched the internet and found that C is for Control and T is for Test. And 2 lines in the C and T zone mean positive and C in fact means "not Covid-19". 

My God did K get a thrashing after his misreading of the results. He himself had a mighty good laugh. But my question was, all this while whenever he took the test, he had been claiming hes negative. By the way he reads the results, I am sure Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta have all had a picnic with him ;) 

PS. Since Chiyaa had a headache, we did book her in for a PCR test in the lab and unfortunately she did come back as Covid positive. Shes fine, just complains of the headache and isolating till the end of this week.