Photo: Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
At the end of last week it was known that the Curative firm, which until now supplied a large part of the coronavirus test kits to the county of Los Angels, could be giving false negative results in asymptomatic people, so now the county has decided to stop using them.
Through a press release on Sunday 10 January, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported that it would stop using Curative’s PCR test kits preventively, following a recently issued FDA alert about potential inaccurate results when given to people without visible symptoms of the disease.
According to county information, Curative would have provided 13, 241 test kits between 13 December 2021 and on January 2, 2021, on mobile testing sites, which represented the 08% of all tests performed during the same period. However, Curative kits would have been in use long before in Los Angeles for much of the 2020.
The county ensures that all coronavirus tests are at risk of false negative results , for reasons such as poor sample collection or low viral load. The health department also emphasizes that PCR tests, such as those provided by the aforementioned firm, are better at detecting the disease than others, including rapid tests.
The county will exchange Curative’s kits for Fulgent Genetics’ kits starting this week, which take the sample directly in the nose and not in the mouth as the successor.
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