4 ms·
But the tests aren't perfect, so how to get actionable data from them isn't clear. We saw this with the flawed west coast studies. If a test has false positive
by bo1024 7y ago
But the tests aren't perfect, so how to get actionable data from them isn't clear. We saw this with the flawed west coast studies. If a test has false positive or false negative rates even as high as 1%, and we run hundreds of thousands to millions of tests per day...that's thousands or tens of thousands wrongly quarantined for 14 days, and the same number who are contagious but told it's okay to go out.
- sesuximo 7y agoIsn't that better than quarantining everyone?
- munificent 7y agoWe are currently quarantining about 300 million here in the US, so tens of thousands would be a massive improvement. The way to think about this is: who do we need to test so we can start un-quarantining people. The goal is not to find out who has it because right now, we are essentially behaving as if the entire US population is infected. The goal is to efficiently determine who is very unlikely to have it so that those people can start incrementally returning to normal life. It's not worth testing symptomatic people: they've already "failed" one test in that we at least know they have symptoms. Simply continue to treat them as infected.
- beamatronic 7y agoIt's all about putting people into risk categories. Then each group's members can act in the optimal way for their group. Then retest/rebalance periodically.
- kd0amg 7y agoI'm pretty sure GP means actual quarantine. We are not quarantining hundreds of millions. We are advising hundreds of millions to practice social distancing.
- Marsymars 7y agoDepends on the circumstances. I live alone and work from home, so there's very little difference for me between the current situation and an indefinite quarantine.
- bo1024 7y agoFor anyone who exercises daily, there's a really big difference!
- Marsymars 7y agoOn a continuum from my usual daily activities (gym for lifting, climbing, ultimate, soccer) and my current activities (bodyweight exercises in my home and runs around my neighbourhood), I’m much closer to indefinite quarantine than I am to a normal state of affairs.
- bo1024 7y agoThese are good points (though broad strokes). Mostly I'm just pointing out subtleties or challenges with this approach. One difference is if a business re-opens and expects people to come in to work, the US probably needs legal protections so quarantined workers don't get fired or forced to come in illegally.