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A reasonable policy is to go home when the machine at the door to your office gives a positive result. Then get a more specific PCR test, and maybe come back to
by tlb 7y ago
A reasonable policy is to go home when the machine at the door to your office gives a positive result. Then get a more specific PCR test, and maybe come back to work. So the cost of a false positive can be one lost day.
The false positive rate of lockdowns is 100%.
- tempestn 7y agoExactly. While this plan would certainly result in some disruption, it would be a lot less than the current status quo. And you can't really compare it to simply "opening back up" without a plan like this, because the simple fact is that even without government-enforced lockdowns, many (perhaps most) people won't return to a normal level of activity if they don't feel safe doing so.
- clairity 7y ago> “...because the simple fact is that even without government-enforced lockdowns, many (perhaps most) people won't return to a normal level of activity if they don't feel safe doing so.“ you’re underestimating the pain that many americans are feeling after just a few weeks of (soft) lockdown. it’s not that people want to be unsafe, it’s that their livelihoods are in grave danger if the lockdowns last for months. many people are willing to take some risk now that the pandemic hasn’t turned out to be plague-levels of badness that some initially feared. few people are economically secure enough to say ‘no’ to opening back up sooner rather than later.
- ceejayoz 7y agos/willing/forced
- tempestn 7y agoAll the more reason why extensive testing, allowing them to go back to work safely, would be great!
- perl4ever 7y ago"many people are willing to take some risk now that the pandemic hasn’t turned out to be plague-levels of badness that some initially feared" Without expressing an opinion of my own, how can you write as though from a twilight zone without causal relationships? I mean, you, or anyone, can doubt that the lockdown is necessary. You might be right! But you must acknowledge and challenge the causal connection between the lockdown and "not plague levels of badness". Comments that just ignore the possibility creep me out, because I can't imagine what the writer is thinking, except maybe "wishing will make it so".
- jhayward 7y ago> The false positive rate of lockdowns is 100%. If that were true lockdowns would make absolutely no difference in R0. Clearly, they do make a difference.
- tlb 7y agoI don't follow your reasoning. Maybe we use a term differently? Here's how I understand them: - A false positive means that a test shows someone is infected when they are not. For most tests that's somewhere between 0.1% and 2%. - Lockdown means everyone stays at home. Different from PB's plan, where only people with a recent positive test stay home. - R0 (technically Re) is the expected number of people each newly infected person spreads it to. When I say a lockdown has a false positive rate of 100%, it means a lockdown is the same as if you tested everyone but the test always (100%) reported positive, so everyone had to stay home every day.
- jhayward 7y agoRe is a different number based on what proportion of the population is immune. Here we are talking about R0. The point I am making is that some of the people who are on lockdown are truly positive for the virus. That’s why it works. They don’t have the opportunity to spread it outside their habitation unit.