ArticleJournal of public health (Oxford, England)2021
Did people's behavior after receiving negative COVID-19 tests contribute to the spread?
Article in Journal of public health (Oxford, England), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Examining the role of COVID-19 testing availability on intention to isolate: A Randomized hypothetical scenario.PloS one · 2022Trial
- Virus Monitoring in Denmark: A Community-Based Self-Sampling System to Surveil Respiratory Viruses and Associated Symptoms.Journal of medical virology · 2025Article
- Daily SARS-CoV-2 Nasal Antigen Tests Miss Infected and Presumably Infectious People Due to Viral Load Differences among Specimen Types.Microbiology spectrum · 2023Article
- Association of COVID-19 mortality with politics and on-demand testing in 217 U.S. counties.BMC public health · 2021Article
- Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
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1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundTesting on demand for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is hypothesized to increase spread of the virus as some persons who test negative falsely assume that they can engage in activities that increase spread.
methodsDaily new COVID-19 hospitalization counts through 2020 from 25 countries that reported testing and hospitalizations were studied by regression of logarithms of new hospitalizations 14 days out against log(new hospitalizations on a given day), log(negative tests), log(positivity rate) and days since the first hospitalizations were reported. The regression coefficients were examined separately for periods in countries that were following three different testing policies.
resultsCorrected for the other factors, negative test numbers when tested on demand and tested if symptomatic only are associated with an increase in hospitalizations 14 days after the tests. When only the symptomatic and more vulnerable are tested, negative tests are associated with fewer hospitalizations 2 weeks out.
conclusionsA policy of testing only vulnerable populations, whether symptomatic or not, appears to avoid spreading the virus as a result of testing policy. False confidence of reduced risk among those who test negative may have contributed to the spread in countries that allowed testing on demand or testing only those who claimed to have symptoms.
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