Coronavirus testing is providing a fundamental lesson for all of us about how medical lab testing works – there are no tests that are 100 percent accurate. Figuring out false positives (indicating a person has a condition when they don’t) and false negatives (indicating a person doesn’t have a condition when they do) for COVID testing is an ongoing, in-the-field, work-in-progress. This means that even if your test comes back negative, yet you’re displaying the signs and symptoms of COVID-19, you may still be asked to act like you have it. New reports of individuals in China who were previously positive, then negative, then test positive again, may be due to the inherent level of test inaccuracy. We will, of course, be watching closely to determine whether reinfection is a possibility. We don’t yet know.
References:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/03/26/negative-coronavirus-test-result-doesnt-always-mean-you-arent-infected/
- https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/27/822407626/mystery-in-wuhan-recovered-coronavirus-patients-test-negative-then-positive