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 …
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Replying to @NewtonMark
This is true, but you also have to consider that the people being tested are not a representative sample of the population - they are usually mostly symptomatic and thus have a higher risk than the general populace
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Replying to @GidMK
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @NewtonMark
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
1 reply 1 retweet 0 likes
So given your scenario of testing last September, we'd expect to see somewhere between 1-300 positive tests for every million tests run. Given the number of false +ves based on retests was only 1 or 2 in October in NSW, you'd expect towards the lower end of that bound
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