The false positive rate on rapid antigen testing is very low. And BinaxNOW antigen tests had up to 99.7% specificity during real-world testing.įalse negatives are more likely than false positives. Flowflex demonstrated 100% specificity during FDA testing. For example, Ellume reports 100% specificity in symptomatic people and 96% specificity in asymptomatic individuals. Specificity will generally be higher than sensitivity, especially when people have COVID-19 symptoms-in other words, false-negative COVID-19 tests are more likely than false positives.Īll rapid tests currently authorized for home use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have high sensitivity and specificity, meaning they have a high accuracy rate.

“Specificity,” meanwhile, refers to a test’s ability to correctly identify people who do not have the virus. How common are false positive COVID-19 tests?įirst, a crash course in virus testing vocabulary: “Sensitivity” measures a test’s ability to accurately identify people who have COVID-19, Dr. Therefore, “false positive” means that you have been delivered a positive result, but are not actually infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “True” and “false” refer to the accuracy of the test, while “positive” and “negative” refer to the outcome you receive, Dr. In the most basic sense, there are four possible outcomes for a COVID-19 test, whether it’s molecular PCR or rapid antigen: true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative. Before you can assume your positive COVID-19 test is a fluke, you need to understand why false positives exist in the first place. Rapid tests are even more trustworthy now, with so many people infected with the novel coronavirus, says Geoffrey Baird, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Should You Do a Throat Swab for COVID-19?ĭon’t dispose of your stash of at-home COVID-19 tests, though: “ are not very common at all,” explains Gigi Gronvall, Ph.D., a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, where she has led efforts to track the development of COVID-19 testing.

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