3 ms·
%age accuracy is meaningless. They need to talk about sensitivity and selectivity. Without those the article is useless.
by DanBC 6y ago
%age accuracy is meaningless. They need to talk about sensitivity and selectivity. Without those the article is useless.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoCan you elaborate?
- heyitsguay 6y agoSince active covid cases are still pretty rare day-to-day at a population level, "Close to 100% accuracy" is ambiguous, and could be very good or basically useless. For example, if 3% of the people moving through that airport actually have coronavirus, a detector that just reads negative for everything would have 97% accuracy - but a 100% false negative rate.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoLike, the reported stats are misleading? I get your point. Though this research has been going on for a while - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52686660 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52686660 - Would be helpful if the report did provide more details on the source for that figure.
- heyitsguay 6y agoI wouldn't even say the reported stats are misleading, just that "accuracy" in a headline is too vague to ascertain performance when you're trying to detect (relatively) rare events.
- dynamite-ready 6y agoA somewhat more detailed description of the efficacy of dogs, in testing for Coronavirus if you're interested: https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-020-05281-3 https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128... Some way off 'Near 100%', but also appears to be high enough to make this one of the better methods of testing currently known. Which is amazing in itself. Incredible, actually, because the more common swab tests are said to have closer to 70% accuracy.