Damn. With those numbers you could mathematically show just how bad the false positives/negatives are. I've never bought into the asymptomatic carriers thing.
There are definitely asymptomatic carriers given that one prison study showing over 95% of positives had no symptoms. False positives wouldn't explain that kind of percentage even with the low sensitivity test.
It's both sensitivity and specificity that determine false positive rate. Do you have a link to the prison study? I'd like to see what they did to confirm the positive test results.
I have not seen the individual study itself, just news reports. I don't have their exact test methodology, but I can't conceive of any scenario where a 70% sensitive test would result in 96% false positives, so there has to be another answer... namely... there are a large number of asymptomatic positives.
I don't have the information at hand, but I heard it directly from one of the lead infectious disease docs at a hospital.
Damn. With those numbers you could mathematically show just how bad the false positives/negatives are. I've never bought into the asymptomatic carriers thing.
There are definitely asymptomatic carriers given that one prison study showing over 95% of positives had no symptoms. False positives wouldn't explain that kind of percentage even with the low sensitivity test.
It's both sensitivity and specificity that determine false positive rate. Do you have a link to the prison study? I'd like to see what they did to confirm the positive test results.
I have not seen the individual study itself, just news reports. I don't have their exact test methodology, but I can't conceive of any scenario where a 70% sensitive test would result in 96% false positives, so there has to be another answer... namely... there are a large number of asymptomatic positives.