PCR testing for COVID aims to  detect individuals who have a high likelihood of being infectious.

False positive test results have more than one cause in PCR testing and productive conversations about them require these categories to be distinguished.

The operational false positive rate refers to the rate of error across the whole process.  This will vary day to day so the rate should be measured as a tendency to a mean not taken as the minimum.  Each laboratory will have its own operational false positive rate and this can vary over time depending on the factors below.

1.       Profiling Errors

Who is being tested has a significant bearing on the false positive rate. Any positive pregnancy test from, say, testing children in a reception class at primary school must be a false positive. Likewise testing asymptomatic people for COVID is much more likely to produce false positive results than testing symptomatic patients.

As it happens, some subpopulations within communities can have a higher baseline false positive rate for unknown reasons. This is a frequent problem we see, for example, in breast and cervical cancer screening in young women. Indeed, this is why those screening programmes do not screen young women.  For COVID a similar unexpected level of false positives was seen in the summer with people in their [C1] 20s.  When this subpopulation with a high false positive rate was discovered, they were targeted for more testing. We now know they were false positive results because the evidence from spring across the world proves that genuine COVID outbreaks spread rapidly between age groups. This did not happen throughout August which proves that the “outbreak” amongst young people was a pseudo-epidemic made up of false positives.

It is important to target testing to people who have symptoms that provide a high clinical suspicion of the disease you are testing for.  This targeting of a subpopulation because they have a high false positive rate is bad profiling. The more people in this subpopulation that you target the higher the false positive rate will be driven for testing as a whole.

2.       Mistaken Identity

The likely underlying cause of the false positives in young people was mistaken identity. When testing for RNA (the viral equivalent of DNA used for replication) the test should be able to distinguish between sequences that are unique to COVID and sequences seen on other viruses or even in human DNA.  However, no test is perfect.

Human DNA has been mistaken for a different coronavirus when doing PCR testing. The human genome comprises three billion letters of code. While none of it may be an exact match for what the PCR test should be detecting, a near match could result in errors in a proportion of the tests. This type of mistaken identity could lead to particular subpopulations being targeted for testing creating profiling errors.

A 2003 outbreak of SARS1 in a care home in British Columbia, turned out to be a common cold causing coronavirus. Coronaviruses are a family of viruses and, although the spike protein of the COVID virus is unique, the rest of the virus has many similar features to other common colds. These similarities can cause mistakes in PCR testing. Because coronaviruses are seasonal, this type of mistaken identity can cause a seasonal variation in the false positive rate.

3.       Contamination of the chain of evidence

There is a chain of evidence from the sample being taken, through delivery to the laboratory, checking in of samples and then opening and working on them. Contamination can happen at any stage. This contamination may come from the individuals carrying out the work or from other patients’ samples once in the laboratory.

Claims that PPE would be effective at preventing contamination from swab takers etc is like claiming that wearing chain mail would prevent you getting sandy on a beach. A delivery driver who is post-infective and shedding RNA could contaminate the containers the samples are transported in.  Whoever opens those containers could then transfer the RNA to the contents. If the same gloves are worn when opening numerous patient sample pots then the possibility for contamination between samples will be high. Many readers may have seen the disturbing images of an undercover Dispatches reporter showing how some samples have been handled when they arrive at a lab.

Contamination is an issue largely because of the nature of the test rather than sloppy handling. Having turned the RNA into DNA, the second step in testing is to multiply the DNA by one billion to a trillion times. That means that even with highly competent sample handling the risk of contamination will remain because only the tiniest fragment of contaminant RNA can create a false positive test result. Reducing the number of times the DNA is multiplied reduces the chance of these errors but not to zero.

4.       Equipment Errors

The testing equipment itself will have a low and fairly constant false positive rate. This is of the least significance but has had the most effort put into understanding it. It is possible to calculate based on retesting samples with different test kits. There seems to be a general misunderstanding that this is the only cause of false positive error and that because it is a low value there is no false positive problem.

5.       Burden of Proof

As well as choosing a reasonable cycle threshold to reduce contamination errors other variations in the criteria used to determine positivity will lead to differences in the false positive rate. It is standard practice to test for three genes belonging to the COVID virus. However, if positive is defined as the presence of a single gene rather than all three then the false positive rate will be higher.

For example, the REACT study at Imperial carried out calibration between PCR tests in commercial laboratories and the same samples tested in Public Health England laboratories. They found 57% false positive rate in May. To minimise this error they used a different criteria to the commercial laboratories. Instead of reporting on one gene at any threshold they chose to define as positive the presence of one gene below a cycle threshold of 37 or the presence of two genes.

The Operational False Positive rate is made up of five types of false positive error: Profiling errors; mistaken identity; contamination errors; equipment errors and differences in the burden of proof. Changes in who is targeted; seasonal infections and laboratory quality standards can lead to changes in the false positive rate over time. The five types of false positive will vary between laboratories so investigations as to the rate at one laboratory can not be extrapolated to another, and each has its own interaction with underlying community prevalence rates, so that the overall epidemiological false positive rate will vary by place, time and testing strategy.