First of all, we don’t know that the symptoms on your arm is HSV 2. It may well be, but that is quite an unusual place for an outbreak of HSV 2. We know that 95% of people who test positive for HSV 2 have it genitally, at least. That is true even if you’ve never had a genital outbreak. We can’t say for certain that this is genital, with a 5% rate of not being genital, but the CDC recommends that you assume you have genital infection and treat it as such.
Also, the HSV 1 antibody test misses 30% of HSV 1 infections, compared to the gold standard western blot so we can’t know for sure that you don’t have HSV 1.
My advice would be tha next time this shows up, have it swab tested using PCR and typing. Then you will know for sure if this is HSV 2.
Lesions that appear outside of the genital and oral region to do not shed virus when symptoms are not present so you don’t need to worry about infecting others when you have no sore present.
Terri