Loading ...Well This is a Welcomed Sight
If you test somebody today, you only know if they’re infected today. And in fact, if you’re testing in a population that doesn’t have very much COVID, you’ll get false positives almost half the time. That is, the person actually doesn’t have COVID. They have something else. They may have nothing.”
That’s part of the story. You also get false negatives. I know people who had the symptoms but came back negative 2 or 3 times before finally getting a positive result when they were more ill.
That is why understanding sensitivity and specificity is so important. The accuracy of a test is dependent upon the prevalence of the disease in the population. This a subject a lot of people have a hard time understanding.