4 ms·
The tests are designed to have high false positives because they have to bias toward few false negatives and there are no perfect tests. What gets me is that th
by lootsauce 5y ago
The tests are designed to have high false positives because they have to bias toward few false negatives and there are no perfect tests. What gets me is that the negative result is the one bearing meaningful information but not the positive result, yet everyone mistakenly talks about positives as if they are far more informative than they actually are.
- pama 5y agoI'm not sure what test you have in mind, and I'm guessing that such tests with high false positive bias might exist, for example the antibody tests. It's very difficult to get a genuine false positive with a PCR-based test: whatever you're reading out should have the same sequence as the part of the virus you're sequencing. The only reasonable way to get a false positive is that you contaminate the sample, but I don't think that the possibility of contamination is part of the design in any of the commercially available tests.
- dboreham 5y agoThere are essentially zero false positives with the PCR test. Only through sample contamination.