While the world talks about the casualties of COVID-19 — all the people who have died so far — one casualty that isn’t getting enough attention, or only sporadic notice at most, is the fact that false-positives to the COVID tests are creating a different type of casualties in people of all ages.
In June 2020 Stat News talked about a premature infant kept from its mother for over eight weeks after the new mom tested positive for COVID-19. She continued to test positive for another 55 days and the hospital continued to deny her personal contact with the baby.
In a September 2020 issue of ICD10monitor, Dr. Erica Remer talked about the casualties of COVID testing with senior citizens, many of whom live in nursing home or assisted living facilities. One facility went on lockdown when a resident tested positive; when the resident was retested, it was negative, as were retests for multiple other residents as well as staff, meaning the original tests were false positives.
While Harvard Health has been focusing on the dangers of false negatives, The Wall Street Journal reported September 15, 2020, that testing firm Becton Dickinson & Co. was investigating reports of false positives with its tests.
A week earlier Boston’s WBUR radio reported that Massachusetts had suspended using tests from another company, Orig3n, after it allegedly provided 358 false positives. The false-positive reports don’t stop there, though: The NFL reported that 77 players had false positives in August; similar stories have spread across the nation. For example, in July the state of Florida was in the news when “hundreds” of labs were reporting a 98% to 100% positive rate — with no negative tests at all.
So how many COVID tests are false positives? The numbers vary, but The Spectator reported September 21 that “problems with test accuracy are likely to be more of an issue globally. The current U.S. Centers for Disease Control test kits can generate up to 30 per cent false positives even in their best laboratories.”
Even if that number is too high, even a low number of false-positives can result in casualties — a fact that has not gone unnoticed by the FDA, which posted a fact sheet on its website September 1, saying that false positives can cause harm to a patient in the form of being isolated, unneeded monitoring of contacts and household members, loss of work and “other unintended adverse events.”
SOURCES:
Stat News June 8, 2020
Icd10monitor September 21, 2020
Harvard Health August 10, 2020
The Wall Street Journal September 15, 2020
WBUR Radio September 8, 2020
ESPN August 24, 2020
Click Orlando July 15, 2020
The Spectator September 21, 2020
FDA.gov September 1, 2020