Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the operational false positive test rates are of PCR testing for covid-19 identified in quality assurance processes; and how such (a) quality assurance processes and (b) results have changed over time.

In June 2020 the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies published a briefing paper on the impact of false positives and false negatives in the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing programme, which is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020

The briefing paper states that the UK operational false positive rate is unknown.