(NaturalHealth365) When the current global pandemic began, first there were concerns about a lack of sufficient and widespread COVID testing.  Next, there were concerns about a lack of ventilators and other medical equipment (although it didn’t take long for reports to come out about ventilator-injury and how the rush to intubate patients was ill-founded in many cases).  More recently, we’ve heard about some state labs delaying or not even releasing negative tests as a way to project an image of so-called local “spikes,” as well as reports about contaminated CDC test results.

In the next evolution of the pandemic, we now are hearing troubling concerns about the accuracy of COVID testing.  As states ramp up their quarantine policies, this is certainly going to be an important issue to watch closely.

CDC COVID testing kits plagued with problems like contamination and low level accuracy

A scientist by the name of Dr. Sin Hang Lee, the current director of Milford Molecular Diagnostics in Milford, CT, recently released a paper titled “Testing for SARS-CoV-2 in cellular components by routine nested RT-PCR followed by DNA sequencing.” In the paper, he details how he examined a sample of official COVID tests to determine their accuracy.

He took 20 COVID test results from the Connecticut State Department of Health and re-examined them.

Here’s a quick summary of his major findings:

• Of the 10 negative tests, he determined that 2 of them (20 percent) were actually positive.
• Of the 10 positive tests, he determined that 3 of them (30 percent) were actually negative.
• This means 5 out of 20 tests were inaccurate.  25 percent of the COVID tests in his official sample – about 1 in 4 – were wrong!

Dr. Lee also discovered evidence of mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suggesting that the virus may already be changing.

His study is small, to be sure. As an aside, it’s also worth mentioning – and we’re not quite sure how to wrap our heads around this information – that Dr. Lee graduated from a medical school in Wuhan, China several decades ago, according to an online bio from a recent 2016 medical conference in Las Vegas.

Still, his findings are telling. And to think that contact tracing is based on this information.  This means you could be forced to quarantine in your home for 14 days – or face fines up to several hundred dollars – all based on a test result that may not even be correct.

As states buckle down on who can come in and where visitors can go, we have to ask: when and how will COVID testing become more accurate?

Here’s a much more PC-explanation about the issue with COVID testing from Penn Medicine, when asked about its accuracy: “Since COVID-19 tests are new, knowing the accuracy is challenging. The accuracy and predictive values of SARS-CoV-2 testing have not been evaluated, and the accuracy of testing depends on which test is used, the type of specimen tested, how it was collected and the duration of illness.”

Penn Medicine goes on to note that no diagnostic test is 100 percent accurate.  Of course.  But is a 25 percent inaccuracy rate acceptable for making widespread public health policies?

Take the state of Massachusetts, for instance. Gov. Charlie Baker just released updates to the state’s coronavirus travel rules, which includes a fine of $500 per day if someone fails to comply with their self-quarantining policy upon entering MA or is unable to provide proof of a negative COVID test.

There’s a famous aphorism known as Hanlon’s razor:

Do not attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. In other words, bad things happen sometimes, but it’s often because people did not think things through properly or were ignorant – not necessarily because they were being bad on purpose.

We’d like to believe that Hanlon’s razor applies to the response to the COVID pandemic from many of our public health officials. We’d like to believe that the major snafu of CDC test results aren’t maliciously designed, but rather ill-founded and short-sighted.

We’d like to believe in the near future that there will be increased transparency, better data, and more ethical solutions and policies to help manage this pandemic.  But, we have our justifiable doubts, based on past performance, as it relates to corruption government “health” agencies.

As always, we’ll be watching these developments closely.

Sources for this article include:

Boston.com
MSN.com
Pennmedicine.org
Int-soc-clin-geri-.com