I was curious about the possible mix up of flu and covid by the testing kit since they are similar, I am not denying that covid exists, just that if the tests are mixing the two up.

No, the covid testing kit was tested with more than a thousand probes and there wasn't a single false positive.

Source: Christian Drosten (he created the test) on the NDR Coronavirus Podcast

There is another source (in German) claiming the same, HN comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22627958 and source here: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/16-Coronavirus-Update-Wi...

> Regarding your question about if we might accidentally test for flu or other, already existing corona virii:

> This was a topic of discussion in yesterday's talk [1] with Dr. Drosten, a virologist who played an important part in the development of the currently used PCR test. He said that there were extensive studies done with hundreds of samples from both flu patients and patients infected with other corona virii and none returned a positive result. The only other positive results were from corona virii that are special to certain animals (bats, some cows IIRC), but none of those are present in humans. So the accuracy of our current PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be extremely high.

Edit: realize now that it's the same person (Dr. Drosten) so same source, but different format (podcast vs transcript)

> And theoretically, the test would give a positive result on some bat corona viruses, but they do not affect humans.

What if I have flu and that corona virus which do not affect humans. People will think I have COVID.

Edit:

The test developed was done against 75 people with various other diseases as listed below to find out the false positive rate. With the 75 samples (having listed diseases), the false positive rate was 0.

  Clinical samples with known viruses Number of

samples tested in all three assays HCoV-HKU1 2 HCoV-OC43 5 HCoV-NL63 5 HCoV-229E 5 MERS-CoV 5 Influenza A (H1N1/09) 6 Influenza A (H3N2) 5 Influenza A(H5N1) 1 Influenza B 3 Rhinovirus/Enterovirus 3 Respiratory syncytial virus (A/B) 6 Parainfluenza 1 virus 3 Parainfluenza 2 virus 3 Parainfluenza 3 virus 3 Parainfluenza A or -B virus 5 Human metapneumovirus 3 Adenovirus 3 Human Bocavirus 3 Legionella spp. 3 Mycoplasma spp. 3

   Total clinical samples 75

I hope we didn't any other major common virus, and also is 75 a big enough number to say that the false positive rate is definitely 0?

> What if I have flu and that corona virus which do not affect humans.

By definition, you can't have the virus which doesn't affect humans. The virus that causes Covid-19 is called SARS-CoV-2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

2 means it's only a second ever recognized such. The first caused the original SARS in 2002-2003.

And that low chance of false positive can be easily derived (as in, just looking at the bars) from the Italian National Biotechnology Association graph, based on the known cases in Italy, which I've cited before. The numbers are orders of magnitude different, so the same can be concluded -- the can be no significant misrepresentation. There's the whole Italy and actual people dying or having to be connected to the machines to keep them alive -- a much bigger and more horrifying confirmation of low chance of false positives than just comparing thousand probes.

"mkagenius" sadly simply reiterates false claim dressed up as a restatement of the question after completely ignoring the answer to which he responds.

The viruses are not similar at all, the symptoms are to some degree.

SARS-CoV-2 is in the same family as SARSv1, MERS, a number of viruses that cause the common cold (229E, OC43, NL63), plus a number of bat viruses. But not influenza!

The test would cause a false positive for the most related ones, specifically SARSv1 and some bat viruses.