While true, if the chance of a false positive is 1:100,000 and you’re doing 25k tests per day, you’ll get a couple per week. If you have suppressed the virus to the point where transmission is negligible, a moderate percentage of positives might be false.https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1323450859984809985 …
-
-
In addition, when case numbers are very low, you can also retest very easily.
-
So in NSW (and maybe Vic too, dunno) the stats tend to hairtrigger on positive tests, as you'd expect; And retests don't show up until a day or two later, as corrections. This happened a lot during the May/June period, low count of positives taken seriously, "cleaned up" later.
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
That may be the case, but if you were doing COVID-19 tests in November last year, 100% of those people would be COVID-negative, you'd still get positive tests, and 100% of those test results would have been false positives even though the reliability of the test is very high.
-
Yep absolutely, with a low enough population prevalence false positives become more of an issue. But even in NSW, which did ~600,000 tests in October, the absolute lower bound of specificity if every +ve was false is ~99.97% so it's a pretty minor problem
- Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.