False positives

[Piggy42]

Just wondering how likely false positives are? Lft Tested last week with cold like symptoms and got very strong positive with two different types of test. 2 days later and line is already much much fainter. Other members of family have similar symptoms but testing negative. Is it likely I don’t really have Covid? Wasn’t sure if tests worked properly for cold symptoms and don’t see point of going for pcr

Very unlikely.

False negatives much more likely.

LFT detect active virus so if it's not there they can't detect it. If you've had more than one positive it's covid sorry op

If you got more than one positive on different tests then I think it's fair to say it's a true positive.

Thank you. Just finding it odd as family don’t seem to have caught it so wondered if it was wrong.

I've got a similar question about false negatives as I've repeatedly tested negative (lft and pcr) despite everyone around me testing positive and having symptoms.

@Piggy42

Thank you. Just finding it odd as family don’t seem to have caught it so wondered if it was wrong.

If you have had two positive lateral flow tests – basically you are positive

Other family members quite probably have it too, as they have symptoms - but they aren't shedding enough virus for a not-very-sensitive LFT to pick it up.

Very unlikely, especially if it was a strong line. My DS has multiple faint false positives on one brand of LFT ( annoyingly usually when his actually ill) but his real positive was a lot stronger.