The problem is how do you test?
If I test 15 people, how many will identify as a false positive?
I am not completely sold on the accuracy of the methods used, particularly nucleotide based analysis, as those are games of statistics and the results weighted by responses to a questionaire.
Of course, verifying by other means comes with their own problems.
There is an Influenza A (H1N1 pdm09) epidemic in the nation right now with very similar symptoms, if not worse.
How do we know these people are not falsely popping positive?
Now - this all comes down to faith in the system and reporting - but the way things have been going, if I were to light up a charcoal grill inside and be found dead a couple days later, the news would report me as a death to this virus.
There again, my general assessment of the medical community is one of overconfidence in their ability - or society accepts their evaluation the same way it would accept a structural engineer's evaluation. Biology doesn't exactly work that way. Lot of tiny shit going on in there and how do you tell the tiny shit apart? … How many viruses that we try to track are actually real - how about our efforts to sequence DNA - how do we know we have read the complete strand, so to speak? Or what we've read the strand from?
Obviously, something is making people sick and it's contagious. I'm not convinced we know as much as we think we do about these things in the wild.
What test was used to determine covid-19 and what other tests were performed (and what were their results?). It's important to remain clear and accurate on what it is that has occurred.