PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — With cases of COVID-19 spiking in people under the age of 29 — an age group where it’s more likely those infected may not display symptoms — there are growing questions about how widespread testing errors may be.
With any medical test, a doctor with the Virginia Department of Health says you can’t rule out the occasional error.
Currently, when being tested for COVID-19, a person is receiving what is known as a diagnostic or PCR test. It’s performed when a swab is inserted into the back of the nose, mouth, or lower respiratory tract in order to collect samples of the virus.
“If they pick that up, it’s very unlikely it’s a false positive,” said Dr. Parham Jaberi, Chief Deputy Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Health, during a webinar last week. “The false negative is more of the concern.”
On the surface, the concern is that a person infected with COVID-19, with no symptoms, will go out into the community and spread the virus after being misdiagnosed with a negative result.
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Jaberi explained that can sometimes happen if a person is tested too soon after a COVID-19 exposure.
“There may not be a virus in exactly the point where that swab goes if someone doesn’t put it in far enough. Or something happens one or the other that the virus particle doesn’t make it to the swab and you had symptoms,” Jaberi said.
To the opposite effect, antibody tests that take blood samples to see if a person had already fought the virus can have errors by picking up something that isn’t necessarily a coronavirus antibody.
“There are other types of antibodies, hundreds of antibodies from other diseases in your body and in the testing a different one may light up and says you were exposed when in fact you haven’t,” Jaberi said. “So that’s a small possibility.”
He says if the antibody test doesn’t detect the antibodies, you likely don’t have them in your system.
“If you got fever, shortness of breath, cough, you should take that very seriously regardless of what the test is,” Jaberi said. “Make sure you isolate make sure you take care of yourself … we know it’s a very small fraction of tests that may give a wrong answer.”
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