While massive COVID-19 testing is aimed at helping to end the pandemic, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is questioning whether the testing is actually creating a pseudo-pandemic, especially when it comes to false positives.
For example, 1,000 employees were furloughed or quarantined at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in 2006 based on 142 positive PCR tests for whooping cough. Yet, when all those employees had cultures taken, not one — not a single one — came back positive.
Likewise, the AAPS says the problem of false positives with coronavirus has consequences, such as quarantining uninfected individuals unnecessarily with infected ones. If you do get a positive test and you’re not feeling sick, then you should ask for a retest, they say: “The dreaded ‘second wave’ might be a surge of false positive tests that are inevitable in mass screenings of healthy persons.”
SOURCE: AAPS October 7, 2020