HARTFORD, Conn. — Primarily, only people in the US who are suspected of having COVID-19 are given a test to confirm, due in part to a lack of widely-available testing kits. In Connecticut, for every six people who take that test, on average, only one of the six tests positive for COVID-19. Many of the others later find out they had the flu, or some other viral infection.
So, could taking a flu test act as part of an exclusionary diagnosis, to help save on tests? To answer that question, we need to first answer another question: How likely is it to get infected with both the flu and this new coronavirus at the same time? For answers, we asked Dr. Michael Grey, the Chief of Medicine at St. Francis Hospital.
“The best evidence that we have right now is that people do not get co-infected with the COVID-19 virus and influenza, so another way of putting that is if you have symptoms consistent with flu, and we are still seeing flu, and you get tested and you’re flu positive, the likelihood that you have COVID-19 as best as we know now, not probably zero, but it doesn’t appear to be happening,” Dr. Grey said, “we have a lot of information from around the world that suggests that’s the case.”
Again, Dr. Grey said we don’t know for certain how likely or unlikely it is. So, he said, proper testing will provide the answer.
“For now, to be honest with you, out of an abundance of, I would say, caution, and just to make sure, if we test a thousand people and I’ll just say 20, if we test them for influenza and we test them for COVID-19 and it turns out that twenty had both, that’s useful information from a science perspective, but so far we’ve not seen that in other parts of the world,” he said.