Apparently Nunavut’s first COVID-19 case was a false positive.
From what I remember reading, it is possible that tests have false positive rates of up to 30%, depending on what’s being tested. Conversely the false negative rates I’ve seen quoted are around 15%, again, depending on tests. I haven’t taken the time to seriously dig into what precisely the numbers are, but you can be sure that in most instances, false positives are rarely corrected to negative and subsequently not reflected in the statistics, while false negatives will eventually become positives later (at least in symptomatic cases).
One of the whole issues of this social isolation is that it’s basically impossible, short of precision testing, to contain it, so efforts are basically about buying time. If these studies of anti-body testing in the San Jose, and NYC area of people having 20-30% antibody rates for COVID-19 are true (hence being already sensitized to it and not being prone to further viral infection), once further confirmation of this broad “already infected” cohort becomes more confirmed, you will see a very suddenly policy change of just freeing up everybody.
The residual hysteria will be with us for at least a year as long as these “second wave” scare-and-fear media reports continue.