Newfoundland COVID Testing Likely to Generate False-Positives

Through an access to information request to Eastern Health Newfoundland & Labrador by a reader of The National Telegraph regarding how many times the PCR tests are cycled in order to test for COVID-19, it was found that Eastern Health was significantly over-testing which can lead to high rates of false positives.

In the response back from Eastern Health they said, “please note that the cycle threshold is 45 cycles,” which was the number of cycles they had been testing with since the beginning of the pandemic last March.

For background on why 45 separate cycles are bad practice, it’s important to know how a PRC test generally works.

PRC stands for a polymerase chain reaction, essentially what the test is doing is taking increasingly larger and larger samples of the biological material collected to see if the virus can be detected. Each cycle doubles the sample tested and the earlier on in the process virus is detected the more likely it is accurate.

On the other hand, by the time the 30-35 cycle is reached the amount of untested samples is quite unlikely to find significant amounts of a virus. 45 cycles are testing the sample in such great detail to find any particle of the virus even if COVID is detected it may not be in a large enough amount to matter. 

According to Dr. Robert Hagan at Medpage Today, “With these types of tests, it’s critical to use an agreed-upon cycle threshold value such as 33 (CDC) or 35 (Dr. Fauci) rather than setting it at a potentially misleading 40 or 45. Many of the current tests in use are preset by the manufacturer to these higher numbers.”

Hagan also stated that above 35 cycles the PRC test is likely to just be finding “destroyed nucleotides” if it does come up with a positive reading for COVID.

This means that Eastern Health is, by the CDC’s and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s perspective, testing for COVID-19 in such an untargeted way that they are likely generating significantly higher rates of false positives than those medial systems. 

Currently, the COVID-19 infection numbers in Newfoundland & Labrador cannot be trusted on their face, so although they have only had 704 “confirmed cases” of COVID-19 they may actually be significantly lower than that due to the issues with false positives inherent in their method of testing. 

Newfoundland has been experiencing a rise in cases with 296 new cases between February 2-15, so before the provincial government tries to act on what it sees as a fast rise in COVID-19 cases they may want to look at the validity of their tests.