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Originally Posted by queasy27
Here's a news article discussing the testing problems with too many positive results in Florida: "Hospitals dispute DOH account that labs aren't reporting negative results."
As for misreporting, is there a financial incentive for labs to report cases as positive when they're not? Don't they get paid the same either way?
If there is fraud by labs who submit charges for patients they haven't tested, what's the benefit in reporting them as positive instead of negative? Positive results would be much more liable to expose the fraud.
Does anyone have a copy of the notification someone received? If people who haven't been tested are receiving text messages or other notifications that they're positive, that sounds much more likely to be a phishing or hacking scam. |
When Covid was first in Florida the concern was that all positive persons were reported to the state. The similar situation exists for all other reportable contagious diseases. If a patient is seen and a lab test done to test for whooping cough and the test is negative, the result is NOT sent to the state. Only positive tests are reported.
Several labs early on believed that the Covid reporting was identical to that for all other diseases, so they only were reporting their positive results. There was no concern early with tracking percent positive. All the old daily reports are available online.
I actually called the Covid hot line in April to ask about one lab with over 200 positive and one negatives. I called the lab and spoke with the director who told me the instruction they had gotten was to just report positives. I suggested they check with the state as I believed their instruction was wrong. You can see that lab on page 20 of the daily report
HERE
No one was manipulating data, no one was lying. It was a simple misunderstanding of the state wanting data on Covid in a different manner than it had on other contagious diseases.
This non-reporting of the negative tests is old news and the state has made it clear that all test results are to be reported. After all the state very much wants the percent positive to be low and this will not happen if the negatives are not reported.
The other factor that can occur is that a lab may have two names. And they may be reporting many of their positives using one format and using another for general reporting.
Is it possible that there are still small labs failing to report their negatives, perhaps. But with many thousand positives a day in the state the failure to record a few dozen or hundred negative will make very little difference in the overall rate of positive tests.
You are totally correct that the lab gets paid the same for a positive or a negative result, and there is no reason to report a positive if a test were not done as that would invite much more scrutiny than a negative.
It is really interesting that every one of these unsubstantiated reports of "I never got tested" claims they were told their test was positive. Sounds bogus to me, maybe people with an agenda to cast doubt on the reality of this serious pandemic.