Social media users question accuracy of COVID tests

Muscat: People around the world have taken to social media to question the effectiveness of testing to detect the presence of COVID-19.

Many of those who have shared their comments on popular social networking platforms have said these tests are false, and have encouraged others to not believe the rates of global infection they come across.

“More testing means more deaths are labelled as coronavirus caused,” said a user named Paul. “Where there are fewer tests, fewer deaths get the official cause listed as COVID-19, even though it may be the cause.”

Jeff Nelson felt that many of the deaths in the US that had been attributed to the coronavirus were not actually because of the disease.

He said: “With phony, mostly false-positive PCR test, very easy to assign 30 or 40k of deaths as “COVID” each month. Voila - a fake pandemic.”

Twitter user Dan said, in a series of tweets: “So on Tuesday evening I was informed I have to isolate due to a flatmate testing positive for COVID-19.

“Myself, my missus and flat mate showed no symptoms, but was told the test could be wrong,” he added. “Was retested Friday and all came back negative, same as the antibody test. So the question is if we received a positive COVID test even though it’s been proven nobody in the flat has ever had it, how many other people have received a fake positive COVID diagnosis?”

In India, a man took to social media to alert the authorities they’d mistakenly reported him as testing COVID positive.

“My actual report is negative,” he said, addressing the health department of Gurugram’s online COVID portal. “After 12 days, report from portal showing positive. What kind of mistake [sic] done by department?”

One user, who went by the name ‘Gooman346’, was quick to decry the results of the test, saying, “if you go take a test, they automatically count it as a “COVID case”. It is a scam, the COVID numbers being reported is [sic] fake”.

Matthew Holliday, who makes no reservations about being a Donald Trump supporter (he tweets as @Matthew_4_Trump), simply said, “Do you trust the test kits? I don’t.”

However, some internet users it was unlikely the entire world would be hoodwinked by the presence of a fake medical test.

“Are you really that nutty you’re claiming they made a fake test for COVID-19 and literally every country went along with it?” wondered aloud a person who went by the name ‘Anarchy Goose’ on Twitter.

Another social media user said, “Even if you thought there was a chance COVID was fake, you shouldn’t ever be willing to test that hunch with your child’s health.”