With a 50% false positive rate, most of your positives are false positive. You might as well just tell everyone who asks for a test that they're infected.
Having more false positives than true positives only works if the people taking the test either don't understand statistics or don't know the test accuracy. I for one would probably ignore a positive result if I thought my chances of true positive were 0.001 and my chances of a false positive were 0.5.
How about we try this: when reporting "facts", how about we try noting that there is uncertainty involved? I know the average Joe and Jane public aren't intellectuals, and it is often how stupid people can be, but on the other hand I think it is also fair to say that we underestimate people.
I think we should at least consider trying this (noting uncertainty in reporting) - it's times like this where we need more ideas and more thinking, not less.
So, We lie to people and tell em they are infected. And then we are angry that FOX or the governor of WV are going to expose our scam?
What did I miss...
I'm assuming there's high false positive rate. If the test has even moderate false negative, then yes it's worse than useless.
(1) you are overwhelmingly unlikely to actually have the disease even if your test comes back positive but you don’t have obvious symptoms
(2) the pool of people testing positive is completely dominated by false positives. The fraction of people testing positive that will actually have the disease would be very small, so you lose the epidemiological benefit of the test (now you can’t actually track the disease well).
So — test is useless for people like you and me who don’t have symptoms or a strong prior probability of having covid BEFORE the test, because even a positive result is overwhelmingly more likely to be wrong, AND now the epidemiologists trying to actually track the disease are instead overwhelmed with false positives so the true signal disappears. It’s bad all around. You could imagine using this as a screening tool, but the false positive rate has to be small enough for that purpose as well (like, less than one percent).