Coronavirus: Screening

(asked on 21st October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the proportion of covid-19 tests that are false negative.


Answered by
Helen Whately Portrait
Helen Whately
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 18th November 2020

In June 2020 the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies published a briefing paper on the impact of false positives and false negatives in the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing programme, which is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020

The briefing paper states that the UK operational false positive rate is unknown.

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