New Delhi: A fresh plea was filed in the Supreme Court, seeking a direction to the central and state governments to disallow stranded migrant workers from returning to their homes even after completing the mandated quarantine on the grounds that medical tests for Covid-19 are often not accurate and throw up false negatives.

If the workers are allowed to go home, the disease may proliferate in the rural belt, undoing all the efforts to contain its spread, according to an intervention application filed by advocate on record Omprakash Parihar on behalf of Kamlakar Shenoy. It said any attempt to send the workers back after testing would only unravel the government’s national lockdown policy.

The test results are not always accurate and sometimes throw up multiple false negatives before a person tests positive.