The National Health Laboratory Service has dismissed claims that there is no clinical value in the health department's strategy to test Covid-19 swabs jammed in the backlog.
A group of scientists from Wits University and the University of Cape Town released a public statement last week in which they said the chances of false negatives were too high with older samples.
They said that this “heightened the chance of a false negative” significantly and that any test swab older than two days should be discarded. In Gauteng, “efforts are under way to manage the backlog”, which stands at 30,000 tests, and the backlogs in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal had been “significantly reduced”.
“An analysis of the previous backlog in the Western Cape has proved that at 14 days after sample collection, there is still a mean positivity rate of 22%.”
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