Residents in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, China, are tested for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus as part of a massive local testing program, Jan. 12, 2021.
Recently, a new wave of Chinese Communist pneumonia (COVID-19) has broken out in mainland China, and many regions have launched large-scale nucleic acid testing, with Shijiazhuang, the hardest-hit area in the epidemic, having conducted two rounds of full-scale testing. However, the mainland media reported that 34% of the confirmed cases in Shijiazhuang were found to be “negative to positive” after testing.
Since the announcement of the trajectory of confirmed pneumonia cases in Hebei, the public has noticed a special phenomenon: some confirmed cases were tested positive in subsequent tests after being tested negative for nucleic acid several times, which is the so-called “negative-to-positive” phenomenon.
According to a report by the Chinese media Xiaoxiang Morning Post on January 14, a reporter from the media was at the Hebei health Commission on January 13, combing through the epidemic in Shijiazhuang to inform the news. It was found that from the 5th to the 13th of this month, the city released a total of 369 notifications of confirmed trajectories, of which the information released from January 5 to 7 stated that no “negative to positive” cases were found; however, the information released from the 8th to the 13th contained 126 “negative to positive” cases, accounting for about 34% of the total number of confirmed cases.
In other words, the percentage of “negative to positive” cases among the confirmed cases in Shijiazhuang in the recent week is more than 30%.
The report mentions a typical case: a patient, now 66 years old, underwent five nucleic acid tests on January 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9, all of which were negative; however, the person was a close contact of other confirmed cases and was therefore transferred to an officially designated isolation site for medical observation on January 10, and on the day he arrived at the isolation site, the nucleic acid test was positive. The patient was again sent to the Jianhua Campus of Shijiazhuang People’s Hospital on the 11th, and was officially diagnosed by the hospital as a confirmed case of CCP pneumonia on the 12th.
Chinese netizens have questioned whether the current nucleic acid testing technology is reliable or not. Can such test results be trusted?
In fact, during the first outbreak in mainland China in late 2019 and early 2020, medical experts found that the accuracy of nucleic acid testing at that time was only 30%-50%, a phenomenon they called “false negatives”.
In an interview with the mainland media in early February 2020, Wang Chen, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, spoke about this phenomenon, admitting that “for patients who really have this disease, [the use of nucleic acid testing] is only 30-50% positive. There are still many false negatives by means of pharyngeal swabs. The nucleic acid is not found, but it actually is.
At the time, the mainland media reported that the kits used to test for CCP pneumonia were approved through the official emergency approval process and were not rigorously tested before going to market, so the quality was uneven, leading to “loopholes” in the real-time fluorescent RT-PCR identification method used for nucleic acid testing. In addition, there are also sources in the industry quoted by the land media that there are multiple steps in the process of virus sampling and testing by medical personnel, each of which may be faulty, resulting in a low accuracy rate of testing.
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