I was watching Politics Live today and Richard Tice was one of the guests. He said that the PCR test that is being used in all the NHS labs is faulty as it produces so many false positive results. He is a politician and I don't think has a health background so I tend to take what someone like that says with a bucket load of salt, but does anyone know if there is any research done to back up his assertions?
I think (but don't know) that other countries using the PCR test would also have this problem (if it exists) there was no one on the programme today from a health background to challenge Richard Tice which I think was a mistake.
ideal conditions for any test: high purity + high viral load.
Covid PCR gives between 2% to 29% false negatives.
That means that the test has between 71%-98% sensitivity.
The problem is the error is subject to interpretation.
The PCR test has very high specificity, so the errors are are predominantly false negatives.
It's true that the test is 70% accurate, but people like Tice prefers to think that the errors are all false positives instead of false positives + false negatives + indeterminate. The latter needs a second test.
In fact, the confidence in Covid PCR test is quite high.
QUOTE:
One community based study of 4653 close contacts of patients with covid-19 tested RT-PCR throat swabs every 48 hours during a 14 day quarantine period. Of 129 eventually diagnosed with covid-19 by RT-PCR, 92 (71.3%) had a positive test on the first throat swab, equating to a sensitivity of 71% in this lower prevalence, community setting.