In a recent research carried out in India, five of thirteen Dengue positive serum samples taken in 2017 have given positive results for the COVID 19 rapid antibody tests. The research was carried out by a group of scientists in Infectious Diseases and Immunology Division, CSIR- Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata with the participation of few other research institutes.
These serum samples had been taken in 2017 when there were no COVID 19 virus presence, and had been archived for research purposes. According to the research paper published as a pre-print in https://www.medrxiv.org/ website, the results of this study demonstrate that in Dengue endemic countries like India and Sri Lanka, antibody detection-based assays can result in false-positive reports for COVID-19 for actually Dengue infected patients. The reverse scenario has been reported from Singapore, i.e. originally COVID-19 patients were mis-diagnosed as having Dengue as antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 cross-reacted in Dengue antibody tests. So, it’s evident that these two viruses can cross react much often and can result problems in serological diagnosis tests.
Recently in Sri Lanka also we saw several false positive cases of COVID 19 being reported creating panic among the general public. So we have to pay much closer attention to this scenario especially when using serological tests for COVID 19 diagnosis.
Are you serious ? Then it’s going to be worse in Sri lanka