Following numerous false positive COVID-19 tests administered by Riverside Medical Group, MFS WordsWorth conducted an investigation to determine the cause for these inaccurate results.
After alarming false positives on January 19 (the school declined to comment on the specific number), Head of School Julia de la Torre sent a school wide email explaining that “all PCR tests that were sent out to the lab for analysis have come back NEGATIVE for COVID-19. This means that the rapid tests we experienced on campus on Tuesday were all false positives.”
Riverside Medical Group, the company which conducted the tests at MFS, was the chosen provider by the MFS COVID Response Team (CRT). Assistant Head of School Meredith Godley explained that before the school year began, “[the CRT] started interviewing different companies that do both pool testing and individual testing and we were looking for companies that had experience with educational institutions, ideally with independent schools.” The selling factor for Riverside was their prior partnership with another independent school which had been “quite successful.”
While using Riverside Medical Group, the CRT kept in close contact with the provider through a liaison on the MFS campus. Godley commented that following the false tests, “We’ve been in close communication with Riverside. They’ve been a great company, and they’ve been very confused by the results as well and concerned about them. They worked in partnership with us, we talked to them throughout the whole situation.”
Godley also explained, “[Riverside] are the ones that communicated with Abbott, and they are the ones that were able to coordinate to get all new machines for Friday’s testing that also came back with false positives, but they do the coordination with the lab and with Abbott.”
Abbott is the manufacturer for the testing machines used by Riverside. Abbott machinery was used for all of the tests administered by MFS on January 19, the day of the false positives.
After receiving the false positives, Riverside ran quality control tests to determine if the false positives were due to their procedure or Abbott’s machinery, but all machines and test kits passed quality assurance tests. “They tested everything, they went through their quality controls, so we haven’t heard anything conclusive yet,” said Godley.
WordsWorth reached out to Riverside for a comment, but did not receive a response. However,
John Koval, the Director of Public Affairs for Rapid Diagnostics at Abbott, wrote in an email to WordsWorth that “We can’t say why any student potentially had a discordant result, but we know that BinaxNOW [the rapid antigen test used to detect COVID-19] shows performance of 95.6% sensitivity in people who are infectious and most likely to be spreading the disease.”
While both the MFS and scientific communities lack a definite answer for the root problem, Godley offered another reason: “We think it is the ghost of Alice Paul that just did not want us testing in the West Building. I am not sure if we will get a better explanation than that.”
