Wrong corona test results: dozens of incorrect results in home insulation | Inland

Things went wrong in Certe’s laboratory in Groningen. During a follow-up on a batch of 3,500 tests, the result of 41 units was wrongly shown to be weak positive.

“Of course you are very shocked by this,” says Anne-Marie van Elsacker, director of medical microbiology at the Certe laboratory. The tests were conducted over the past two weeks among employees and clients of various healthcare institutions in Groningen and Drenthe. It concerned the well-known PCR test, which, according to RIVM, is the most reliable way to detect the virus. “We immediately called the healthcare institutions so that they could take the correct measures.”

Weakly positive

It is referred to as a weakly positive test result when traces of the corona virus are visible. This may mean that the virus is in the early stages of the contagious period, but it can also occur around the end of the contagious period.

“Those weak positive results regularly give us headaches,” said Van Elsacker. “They can indicate two stages of the virus: the initial or final phase.” Then the test sometimes does not provide clarity.

“You have to be careful how you interpret such a result. We always do an extra confirmation test in the lab in these cases. At the party in question, we even did a third test just to be sure. ” How things could go wrong on this scale cannot be said with certainty. Certe is still researching this.

Reversed

Although an unjust quarantine is annoying, the consequences seem not to be too bad: rather too many precautions than too few. But what if people who are infected still get a negative result? “That can go wrong in particular during the administration of the tests. For example, the cotton swab must go deep enough into the nose to be able to grab enough virus particles. Although this often happens very precisely, certainly in the tests for healthcare, ”says van Elsacker.

She thinks that the chances of things going wrong in the laboratory are considerably smaller: “As a test, we always add positive control samples. If they still color positive after that test, the result we expect, we know that it has been carried out correctly. ”

The fact that the tests were conducted among employees and clients of healthcare institutions makes it even more annoying, according to Van Elsacker. “If you test a stadium full of civilians, and you have one miss, it is not a big problem for public health. But if that one person works in a hospital, it is much worse. ”

She takes the control of the test results even more seriously after this miss: “We will be checking the tests extra in the near future. I am aware that citizens cannot check whether we are doing our work properly. We don’t want this again. ”

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