It appears this person is also spending most of his time ( whilst living in Sydney) writing for The Guardian and The Observer. Is he still a practising epidemiologist?
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Yes. I write a column about once every two months for the Guardian at the moment. Also, lol at "whilst in Sydney" what does that even mean?
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Replying to @GidMK @ronnytodgers and
My tweet was not a personal snipe at you. I was responding to a previous post which included a retweet of one of your posts. My point re your residence in Sydney, was to illustrate that Dr Claire Path is based in the UK, thus her views are more relevant to me personally.pic.twitter.com/HmbUNtU5NV
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The ONS agrees with my views, as I cite in my blog on the matter. I was also born and raised in London if that makes a difference


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Replying to @GidMK @ronnytodgers and
I’m sure your views are just as valid as all practising medical professionals. As a non-medical person, I’m out of my depth with regards to epidemiology & virology. But I have the ability to analyse ONS stats & other data, which is how I form some of my own independent views.
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Well, the ONS states that the false positive rate of COVID-19 PCR tests in England is at most 0.08%, and likely quite a bit lower. This is a mathematical fact, despite the myths spread by people who do not like mathspic.twitter.com/sriozqTPuw
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Very simply - if you do 210,000 tests, and 160 of them come back +ve (the July numbers from the ONS), then AT MOST the false +ve rate is 160/210,000 = 1 per 1,250 tests. But since it's extremely unlikely that ALL of those tests were false +ves, the rate is probably lower
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In NSW, Australia, we recently ran 236,201 COVID-19 PCR tests during an outbreak and found 96 +ves. With 1 confirmed false +ve (we retest most positives), we can say that the false positive rate is at most 0.04% but is probably 0.0004% or lower (1 per 250,000 tests)pic.twitter.com/52OojXH9IW
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Some people like to say that as prevalence in the community increases, so too does the false positive rate, which is not entirely untrue - most false positives in PCR are due to cross-contamination and this becomes more common as case numbers rise...
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...but the obvious fact here is that this REQUIRES CASE NUMBERS TO RISE. So yes, in a massive epidemic where labs are overwhelmed you may see a lower specificity, but as the % positive rises specificity matters less and less
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Looking at the UK's % positive, which is ~8% right now, even if the false positive rate had increased by 10x since the ONS did their survey in July, it would not make even a tiny dent on the true case numberspic.twitter.com/t8ECdWgXPK
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