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by hn23 2271 days ago
Would a false positive bad in this situation if social distancing is required?

False negative would be more bad or am I missing something?

1 comments

A 10% false positive rate for just about any test would render it mostly useless (see above).
The alternative of everyone staying at home has 100% false positive rate, so 10% is a huge improvement, not useless.
Remember, there’s probably a similarly high false negative rate. Also, take into account the number of people who won’t be going home, but will instead be flooding into ERs.

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.