Masis Isikbay

Masis, Biology major graduated class of 2012, is a chief resident physician at University of California San Francisco and recently published a paper in Respiratory Medicine Case Reports about applying statistical tools to negative COVID-19 tests.  

“It is very easy to anchor to a diagnosis in the setting of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic,” says Masis Isikbay, MD, PGY3 resident and lead author on this study. “It is for this reason we hope the applied statistics in this case will give providers a practical framework for contextualizing multiple negative RT-PCR tests for various patient populations.” 

Overall, COVID-19 infection should be effectively ruled out with three negative RT-PCR results. In areas of higher disease burden (prevalence of 25%), the false negative rate after four RT-PCR tests is below 1%. Even with a very high prevalence of 50%, the false negative rate is low (2.7%) after four negative tests, suggesting that alternative diagnoses should be strongly considered.