MOSCOW, November 5. /TASS/: An erroneous COVID-19 test does not affect a patient’s treatment if they have symptoms of the disease and the corresponding clinical picture, Sergei Avdeev, head of the Department of Pulmonology at the First Moscow State Medical University, informed.
Earlier, he said that a COVID-19 test can give a false negative result in about 30-40% of cases due to faulty extraction of biological material. He added that during the early stages of the disease, a positive test is more likely.
"As for the potential wrong results of PCR testing, I would like to add that if there are clear symptoms, clinical symptoms of COVID-19, the results of PCR testing do not affect the treatment procedure. Besides, if there are clinical symptoms, there are other methods of lab testing that can confirm the coronavirus diagnosis," he noted.
Since the start of the pandemic, over 48 million people have contracted the disease worldwide and over 1.2 mln have died. In Russia, 1,712,858 cases of COVID-19 have been documented so far, with 1,279,169 recoveries and 29,509 fatalities.
