Duterte orders DOH probe into 'false positive' COVID-19 results in Red Cross labs

— An investigation is underway after President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the Department of Health to look into reports that COVID-19 tests conducted at the Philippine Red Cross produced inaccurate results.

Duterte, who has launched an all-out offensive against Gordon and PRC for the lawmaker's investigations into his administration's questionable pandemic spending, claimed that 44 out of 49 hospital personnel who tested positive in their first RT-PCR test taken at PRC's Subic laboratory, yielded negative results when they took the same test in other laboratories.

Although RT-PCR tests are deemed as the"gold standard," local and international experts say no test is 100% accurate. A study published in The Lancet Microbe showed an infected person's viral load is at the highest five days since the onset of symptoms. It generally goes down as time passes, eventually making it undetectable in RT-PCR tests.

"You could be putting more people at risk," he told PRC."You could be falsely adding to the total positive cases per day of this country.""It is possible for test results from the same case collected at two different time points to vary, potentially due to the timing of specimen collection and other possible sources of variation in the pre-analytical, analytical and post-analytical phases," she said in a statement on Tuesday.

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