The report has some specific recommendations for diagnostic tests that check to see if someone is currently infected with coronavirus.

Testing is most useful for clinical care of patients, for disease surveillance and contact tracing and for monitoring frontline workers such as emergency responders, doctors and nurses who may have been exposed, the report recommends.

People with symptoms should also be tested, it says.

But coronavirus testing is not accurate enough yet to use in many other ways, the CIDRAP team said.

It recommends against:

• Universal testing in hospital settings

• Testing in schools or other low-risk settings

• Widespread community-based testing

• Antibody tests to decide who goes back to work

• Immunity passports

It might be useful to test asymptomatic people in long-term care facilities in some cases because they are likely to have many cases, the report said.

They are most useful for identifying donors of plasma used to treat patients or for deciding on how to manage patients when standard diagnostic tests are negative, the report says.

It's not clear if antibody tests are useful for testing of health care workers to determine immune status, according to the report.