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2020-

2020-09-17 d
THE COVID-CON III

Covid-19 and the false positive trap

Imagine a world where Covid-19 has been eliminated. To be certain this is true, the government conducts regular tests at random. The number of positive results should be zero, right? Wrong. There will always be a proportion of cases tested that come back with a false positive test result. Thankfully, for Covid-19, the false positive rate is less than one per cent of tests done. But it is not zero. It will be impossible for us to ever reach zero. Why? Because Covid-19 cannot be eliminated, even if it is likely to evolve to be more benign and become a seasonal problem like influenza.

Coronaviruses are, after all, seasonal, and as winter approaches we can expect more outbreaks of genuine Covid-19. In the meantime, understanding what the data will look like when Covid-19 is at minimal levels is critical to identifying real outbreaks in the noise (and distinguish these from false positives). As we move forward with this disease, we need to clearly understand where the risk is real and where the risk is almost non-existent, to prevent unnecessary harm from unnecessary interventions.

One of the problems we encounter here is the false positive rate. Put simply, the more tests, the greater the absolute number of false positives. (read more)

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