Originally Posted by
Muskie in dayton
The NY Times article I linked above mentioned a newer COVID test with 95% accuracy on the positive and negative sides. That sounds pretty good, but doing the math reveals the problem. With a testing population of 10,000, assume 1% actually have COVID. So 100 have it, 9900 do not. Then doing some basic math with with 95% accuracy, you can expect:
- 5 False Negatives (.05*100)
- 495 False Positives (.05*9900)
So theoretically, this testing method will show 95 true positives and 495 false positives. That means that roughly 4 our of 5 positive tests is not real. That's a problem.