>sensitivity was 88.66% and specificity was 90.63%
My understanding is that this test will miss 12 in every 100 covid-19 infected individuals, and it will return a false positive for 10 in every 100 patients.
My intuition says this is more than acceptable for a rapid test. But I would love to see the opinion of someone with some clinical experience.
That's a little unintuitive, but here's how it breaks down, without taking into account false negatives:
* 10% of the population will receive a false positive
* 0.1% of the population will receive a true positive
Which category are you more likely to fall into--10% of the population or 0.1%? You're 100 times more likely to fall into the false positive category.
A false negative is worse than a false positive.
Our medical infrastructure is already strained. If you tell 100x the number of actually infected people that they are infected, everything will grind time a halt.
It’s important to find a balance. A single false negative could be disastrous—but so could 1000 false positives. If the false negative and false positive rate are both 10%, and 0.1% of the population is infected, there will be 1000 false positives for every false negative. Both of those are going to cause huge (but very different) problems.
[0] https://rapidward.com/assets/downloads/Li_et_al-2020-Journal...
False negative would be more bad or am I missing something?
If you want to cause true mass hysteria and quickly overwhelm our already strained medical infrastructure, tell 10% of the population that that have SARS-CoV-2.
You need to stay home. There’s no way around it—certainly not for $20.