NEW ORLEANS – As COVID-19 testing continues to ramp up across the state, some people have voiced concerns about the accuracy, claiming they’ve received a negative test result when, in fact, they were positive.
New Orleans resident Joseph Goines is concerned this could potentially put his loved ones at risk.
“My biggest concern would be passing it onto the older population,” Goines said. “I mean, that would be devastating, obviously, if I were to infect someone close to me and I believed that I was responsible for it.”
LSU Health expert Dr. Lucio Miele says the biggest reason a test could come back as a false negative is because some testing methods are more sensitive than others.
“So, what’s positive in one test can be negative in another. One is the so-called antigen test, which basically looks and measures vital particles,” Miele explained. “These are only approved for people with symptoms. The other kind of test is called molecular testing and they actually measure genes from the virus.”
