Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hugey010 2719 days ago
If you have any kind of test that seems relatively accurate (5% failure rate), 1 in every 20 tests will be identified as a positive candidate no matter the actual incidence rate. When applied over a huge population the number of positive candidates is going to also be huge. Since the incidence rate in this scenario is so low (1/1000) the odds of a true positive selected from the positive candidates is also very low.