Ohio governor says Covid-19 tests are reliable despite receiving false positive

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine wants Americans to believe that Covid-19 testing is reliable, despite receiving conflicting positive and negative results on the day he was set to meet with President Donald Trump.

“People should not take away from my experience that testing is not reliable or doesn’t work,” DeWine said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” of his false positive Thursday. After the positive test, he subsequently tested negative three times.

He noted that the antigen test he took that day that revealed the false positive “should be looked at as a screening test,” and that 1.3 million Ohioans have taken a PCR test, which is “very very reliable.”

“The antigen tests are fairly new. And the companies that are coming out with them, quite frankly, have the burden of showing, you know, how good they are ... you have to understand going in that you can get the false positives, like happened in my case, or you can get the false negatives,” DeWine continued.

Ohio, along with five other states, reached a decision on a plan to do more antigen tests in an effort to speed up coronavirus testing. The agreement, signed by the state’s governors, will allow each state to receive 500,000 tests. DeWine said the states may put their “purchasing power together” for things other than antigen tests as well.

“We are taking this one step at a time. What we saw the other day is certainly, if anyone needed a wake-up call about antigens, how careful you have to be, we certainly saw that with my test. And we're going to be very careful in how we use it,” the governor added.