![]() So it is the biology of the virus and the biology of the infection that also impacts how effective and how accurate these tests are." "If you test me the first day I have symptoms, the amount of virus in my respiratory tract is going to be low compared to what it will be four or five days later. We've also learned that just swabbing your throat isn't as good of a specimen."Īlso important, Caliendo continued, is the timing of the test, and where people are in the course of their illness. Just swabbing the tip of your nose isn't going to give you as good of a specimen. way back into the nasal pharynx in order to get a good quality specimen. "The obvious example, if a specimen is left in the back of a car for a day in a hot area and gets roasted, that's obviously not going to be good for a specimen," said David Louis, MD, pathologist-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital.Īngela Caliendo, MD, PhD, an infectious disease expert at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, added that "you have to go. So people who identify potential concerns that might lead to increased spread of infection should be taken seriously, and those concerns should be evaluated as we get more data." "But I go back to the idea about which is the greater harm? Should we rather be overly cautious versus cavalier? The danger in a pandemic is much greater in being cavalier. But we need better tests, and we need to know how these tests perform so that we can interpret them properly."Īsked if he fears being perceived as an alarmist with suggestions that prevailing test strategies will send many infected doctors and nurses into hospitals, clinics, and practices to endanger patients, West said he's prepared for criticism. ![]() "This is not a criticism of the test development industry or our universities they're working really hard on this. "We need to just be cautious about how we treat negative test results especially in higher risk individuals and we need better tests that I know our laboratories and our scientists are working night and day to get us," added West. That's also of concern as scientists raise new questions about whether getting infected with COVID-19 provides sufficient protection or immunity from getting either re-infected or having an illness recur from the original infection. ![]() That means there would be a lot of healthcare workers treating patients while they were infected with COVID-19, and more waves of vulnerable people getting exposed and getting sick. And if only 1% of California's population were tested, there could be 20,000 false negative tests just in that one state. That would mean 2 million false negatives if comprehensive testing were implemented. That becomes important in testing large numbers of people, say in the state of California, with 40 million people, said study co-author Priya Sampathkumar, MD, an infectious disease doctor at the Mayo Clinic. "And if the sensitivity was not 90%, but was only 70%, as cited in some of these early reports such as those from China, the number of false negative results would triple, to well over 100,000." ![]()
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