Up to 9 in 10 COVID PCR ‘Positives’ Were Not True Infections

When a “Positive Test” Wasn’t an Infection After All

A major new analysis out of Germany has raised a simple but uncomfortable question: how many of our COVID “cases” were ever real infections?

Researchers analysed PCR results from laboratories responsible for around 90% of all COVID tests in Germany and compared them with IgG antibody tests — the marker that someone truly mounted an immune response to SARS-CoV-2.

Their analysis suggests: only about 14% of people who tested PCR-positive later showed antibodies. When the authors adjusted for testing bias,  they claimed the true figure may be closer to 11%.
In plain terms, roughly 9 out of 10 “positive” PCR results did not match a confirmed infection.
Frontiers

Why did so many “positives” go nowhere?

The German researchers didn’t blame the PCR machines themselves. Instead, they argued to how PCR was used in the real world:

• High cycle thresholds: Many labs ran PCR tests up to CT 40–45, even though samples that only turn positive above CT 30 are “commonly not considered infectious.” At those levels, even harmless fragments can trigger a positive signal.
  Frontiers

• Contamination risk at high CTs: Some assays produced positive results on pure water at CT 36–38.
  Frontiers

• Low prevalence: When very few people are actually infected, even a highly specific test will generate a large proportion of false positives.
  Frontiers

• What PCR actually detects: PCR swabs pick up genetic debris at the surface, not necessarily a virus that has breached the mucosal barrier and triggered an immune response.
  Frontiers

Put together, the authors conclude that PCR-positive counts were never the same as infection counts — and that the pandemic’s daily “case numbers” were inflated by a factor of seven to nine.
Frontiers

And this wasn’t what we were told

Early in the pandemic, governments and journals reassured the public that PCR tests were “over 95% accurate.”
But those figures came from clean laboratory conditions, not mass testing in the community.
GOV.UK

A Lancet commentary even warned in 2020 that false positives could become a serious problem in low-prevalence settings — which is exactly what the German data later revealed.
The Lancet

More recent US data shows false positives in rapid antigen tests as well, including persistent positives in people with autoimmune conditions.
NEJM / UMass Chan

Why it matters now

The German study is not anti-PCR. It’s pro-precision. It shows that policymakers talked about “cases” when they were really counting positive swabs, and those weren’t the same thing.

PCR tests need context — CT thresholds, clinical symptoms, antibody follow-up, and real-world specificity data. Without that, we risk repeating the same mistake: treating detection as infection, and building national policy on that confusion.

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References

This article is based on the work of Dr John Campbell

1. Günther M, Rockenfeller R, Walach H. A calibration of nucleic acid (PCR) by antibody (IgG) tests in Germany: the course of SARS-CoV-2 infections estimated. Frontiers in Epidemiology. 2025.
   https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/epidemiology/articles/10.3389/fepid.2025.1592629/full Frontiers

2. Surkova E, Nikolayevskyy V, Drobniewski F. False-positive COVID-19 results: hidden problems and costs. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. 2020.
   https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30453-7/fulltext The Lancet

3. Mayers C, Baker K. Impact of false-positives and false-negatives in the UK’s COVID-19 RT-PCR testing programme. UK Government Office for Science / SAGE. 3 June 2020 (updated 2022).
   https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020/impact-of-false-positives-and-false-negatives-in-the-uks-covid-19-rt-pcr-testing-programme-3-june-2020 GOV.UK

4. Herbert C, McManus DD, Soni A. Persistent False Positive Covid-19 Rapid Antigen Tests. New England Journal of Medicine. 2024;390(8):764–765, and related commentary.
   https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2313517 PubMed+1

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