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Comment by Kreotiko | Hacker News Reader

I am no expert but isn’t 200k sample a low number? I am worried about false positive

Why? A false positive it’s actually not that big of a deal. You spend a day being really cautious and you get another test to confirm, and then it turns out that you didn’t actually have Covid and you feel amazingly relieved.

It’s a false negative they really need to worry about. Then you have people who are going around super spreading but telling everyone that it’s fine because they tested negative.

A lot of false positive would make this solution unreliable and would have the same effect of a lockdown. Also, 70k people sample could also mean discrimination towards minorities, we aren’t all made the same.

Can't they use the data from people they test to further improve the model?

I think so. This is a good start for sure

lockdown is literally the goal. this is an example of a way to target such a lockdown instead of a blanket quarantine. if you can reliably get false negatives, you can clear people to go out.

"false negatives" => "true negatives"

If you can reliably get true negatives, you can clear people to go out.

People voting me down probably didn’t get my point. If a tool is inefficient people won’t use it. A way to detect COVID that would produce many false positive would mine the spread of its use. Also, if the demographic sample is not done properly in theory you could risk having people underrepresented getting the wrong end of the stick. Imagine what this would mean in countries like USA!

>> You spend a day being really cautious and you get another test to confirm,

It depends whether there's a casual reason for detecting the same person as positive.

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