Traveler’s Morocco Trip Nearly Derailed by False Positive COVID Test

The events took place on July 4 and 5. Nassim*, 27, who was about to leave for Morocco the next evening, asked his nurse sister to perform a PCR test. The result turned out to be positive. He is then forced to cancel his rental, notify his two colleagues that they have been declared contact cases with the Health Insurance and prepare to spend his week of vacation confined, reports La Dépêche du Midi.

"Yet I had been careful," assures the paramedical worker. He has doubts about the result. Nassim then took an antigen test on the morning of August 5. The result is negative. Surprised, he went back to the Bio 3 laboratory that had analyzed his sample the day before. This laboratory performs a new analysis of the first sample. The laboratory acknowledges: it had made a mistake due to "a strong positive that would have contaminated everything."

The new result was transmitted to the health insurance. Nassim arrived in time to catch his flight to Morocco. "I left for Toulouse airport as soon as I knew it was a mistake, but it was already late, I barely caught the plane. In the emergency, I didn’t even have time to pack my suitcase properly," he says.

According to the Bio 3 laboratory, this is the first time such an error has occurred. "Like all biological analyses, we sometimes have false positives or false negatives. This can be related to interfering substances or contamination between samples, especially if one of them has a very high viral load," explains one of the biologists.

*Borrowed first name