False negative rate of COVID-19 PCR testing: a discordant testing analysis

• Published in: Virology journal Vol. 18; no. 1; p. 13
• Main Authors: Kanji, Jamil N., Zelyas, Nathan, MacDonald, Clayton, Pabbaraju, Kanti, Khan, Muhammad Naeem, Prasad, Abhaya, Hu, Jia, Diggle, Mathew, Berenger, Byron M., Tipples, Graham
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central Ltd 09.01.2021; BioMed Central; BMC
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Alberta; Canada; clinical examination; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; COVID-19 - diagnosis; COVID-19 - virology; COVID-19 infection; COVID-19 Nucleic Acid Testing - statistics & numerical data; Discordant testing; DNA-directed RNA polymerase; Evaluation; False negative rate; False Negative Reactions; False negative results; Female; Genes; Health aspects; Humans; Infections; Male; Medical laboratories; Middle Aged; Molecular Diagnostic Techniques - statistics & numerical data; nucleocapsid; Nucleocapsids; Pandemics; Patients; Polymerase chain reaction; Public health; Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction; reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction; Ribonucleic acid; RNA; SARS-CoV-2; SARS-CoV-2 - isolation & purification; Sensitivity and Specificity; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Short Report; Viral envelope proteins; Viral proteins; virology; viruses; Canada; Alberta Canada; Alberta; COVID-19; Discordant testing; SARS-CoV-2; False negative rate

COVID-19 is diagnosed via detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA using real time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rtRT-PCR). Performance of many SARS-CoV-2 rtRT-PCR assays is not entirely known due to the lack of a gold standard. We sought to evaluate the false negative rate (FNR) and sensitivi...