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If South Korea and the UK, with fairly significant testing, have both found ~3% positives, then even if you assume the people tested were 100x more likely than
by vannevar 7y ago
If South Korea and the UK, with fairly significant testing, have both found ~3% positives, then even if you assume the people tested were 100x more likely than the general population to have the disease, then in South Korea you'd have around 15k cases (about 2x reported) and in the UK around 19k (around 13x reported). If you assume the tested were only 10x more likely to be infected, those numbers scale correspondingly to 150k (20x reported) and 190k (130x reported).
- dboreham 7y agoThe test only finds active infections, note.
- vannevar 7y agoCan you test negative and still be contagious? That would obviously make the potential ratio much larger.
- dboreham 7y agoAs I understand it, yes. The probability of that, I'm not sure. This is where I found information about the nuanced properties of the test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGiOi7eV05g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGiOi7eV05g It's from there that I realized the test doesn't seem to be intended to be used in the way most people think -- it's supposed to be a "if a patient arrives in hospital with pneumonia, do this to tell if they have covid" tool, not a "if some random person wonders if they have it or not, run this test" tool.