Tests aren't foolproof and they can give a 'false sense of security.'
TORONTO — When Bonita Mak went to visit a friend in a country home outside of Toronto, she says she got a COVID-19 test beforehand to make sure she wasn’t putting the people around her in danger.
But while COVID-19 testing is easily accessible in Ontario, experts are warning about their shortcomings. They say tests can’t detect the virus during its incubation period, and still yield a considerable rate of false negatives.A food delivery driver walks past as hundreds of people line up at a COVID-19 testing clinic on July 15, 2020 in Montreal.
Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, said the test is about 65 per cent accurate. False negatives can happen if a patient had only got the virus very recently and it hadn’t multiplied enough to be caught by the nasal swab.“The technology is sound, but you do not have really great accuracy, not really the kind of accuracy that you think of when you think of this kind of testing,” Furness said.
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