⁍ Social media users have been sharing a post saying any cold or common flu can be misdiagnosed as COVID-19.

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⁍ One Facebook user says their relative was told by a doctor in New York that ‘any cold or flu can show up positive on a COVID test’
The post does not mention the type of test.

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– You may have heard that a test can identify a common cold or flu infection called COVID-19. Well, that’s not exactly true, according to fact-checkers at the Washington Post and Reuters. Swab tests are “very specific” and “more likely to throw a false negative than it is a false positive,” one expert tells Reuters, while an Imperial College London virology expert says only about 20% of colds are caused by seasonal coronaviruses like COVID-19, and the rest by rhinoviruses. “The test is more likely to throw a false negative than it is a false positive,” another expert says. There are two types of tests used to diagnose COVID-19: a swab test and an antibody test. The antibody test looks for antibodies to other coronaviruses, but they’re not being used to diagnose COVID-19. “People are seeing some cross-reactivity in antibody tests,” says Imperial College London’s Reader in Virology. One Facebook user says his relative was told by a doctor in New York that “any cold or flu can show up positive on a COVID test,” but the post doesn’t say what type of test is used. SARS-CoV-2 swab tests are “very specific,” another expert says. “The specific nature of these sequences means that someone with flu or a common cold virus is highly unlikely to test positive for COVID-19.”