To ask Her Majesty's Government what advice they have received from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies about false positive results from COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction tests.
Answered on
1 February 2021
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies published their paper Impact of false-positives and false-negatives in the UK’s COVID-19 RT-PCR testing programme on 3 June. A copy is attached. This paper indicated that the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain reaction assays used for the COVID-19 testing programme have been verified by Public Health England and show over 95% sensitivity and specificity. The current tests are very specific and the risk of false positives, where the test is reacting to other viruses, is extremely low. Like any diagnostic test there is a possibility of a false negative or false positive result, but this is very small. Independent, confirmatory testing of positive samples indicates a test specificity that exceeds 99.3%, a false positive rate of 1%. Additional guidance has been provided to laboratories to reduce the rate even further.