Ohio Governor Warns People Against Seeing Coronavirus Tests As Unreliable After He Received A False Positive
(CNN) -- Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Sunday warned Americans against seeing coronavirus tests as unreliable days after he received a false positive result before a scheduled meeting with President Donald Trump.
"I think what people should not take away from my experience (is) that testing is not reliable or doesn't work," DeWine, a Republican, told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union."
DeWine said the antigen test he took last Thursday that yielded the false positive "should be looked at as a screening test" and that the PCR test, which he said over 1,300,000 Ohioans have taken, "is very, very, very reliable."
"The antigen tests are fairly new. And the companies that are coming out with them, quite frankly, have the burden of showing, you know, how good they are," he said. "Could they be used in some situations? Yeah, they could be, but you have to understand going in that you can get the false positives, like happened in my case, or you can get the false negatives."
DeWine said on Saturday that he and his wife, Fran, tested negative for Covid-19 for a second time following the false positive.
"The test results today follow the negative PCR test results for the Governor and First Lady on Thursday. The PCR tests taken Thursday were negative for the Governor, First Lady, and staff members, and were run on lab machines twice with results coming in negative both times," DeWine said in a statement Saturday.
The false positive result came from an antigen test DeWine took as part of the testing protocol established in order to greet the President, who traveled to Ohio on Thursday, the statement said.
CNN reported in April that so far, antigen tests for coronavirus don't work consistently. Based on similar antigen tests for respiratory diseases like the flu, their sensitivity -- the ability to correctly identify patients with Covid-19 -- ranges between 34% and 80%, according to the World Health Organization.
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