Even if you test negative for COVID-19, assume you have it, experts say

https://www.livescience.com/covid19-coronavirus-tests-false-negatives.html

Conventional diagnostic tests for the novel coronavirus may give false-negative results about 30% of the time, meaning people with an active COVID-19 infection still test negative for the disease, according to news reports.

"Unfortunately, we have very little public data on the false-negative rate for these tests in clinical practice," Dr. Harlan M. Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale University and director of the Yale New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times. However, preliminary research from China suggests that the most common type of COVID-19 test, known as a reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, may give false-negative results about 30% of the time.

 

 That said, no diagnostic test provides accurate results 100% of the time, and the tests developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highly sensitive to the coronavirus, Dr. Larry Madoff, medical director of the Bureau of Infectious Disease at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, wrote in a statement, according to the Globe.
"No test detects every case and there is no current 'gold standard' to compare [the COVID-19 tests] to," he wrote. "Testing may be falsely negative if the test is obtained too early or too late compared to infection, or if the sample isn’t obtained or processed correctly."