[Gibbon1]

Who do we believe a bullshit artist at the economist or Bob Wachter Chair, UCSF Dept of Medicine.

> @Bob_Wachter > 3/ Another interesting #: @ucsf, we only test pts w/ symptoms, who all think "I have Covid.” But only ~4% of our tests are +, meaning most folks who think they have it, don’t.

https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1247722427620012032

[jrfinkel]

I don’t think it’s that simple about the tests. They’re less accurate than people think. Here’s one article about it (if you google you can find more): https://www.wsj.com/articles/questions-about-accuracy-of-cor...

Also, if you don’t trust the WSJ either (I wouldn’t blame you) here is an article from Nature Medicine that has a comparison of nasal vs stool tests for covid, and Figure 1b really drives home the high rate of false negatives for nasal swab tests compared to stool tests (and throat swabs are even worse than nasal swabs): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0817-4?fbclid=IwA...

[dhc02]

Yep. In fact, false negatives of current test are a function of time since the onset of symptoms:

Day 1? ~7% false negative Day 10? 40% false negative Day 20? 90% false negative

That's really high, and it seems anecdotally likely that a majority of tests have been administered to people who are 7-10 days or more post-symptom-onset.

Here's the tweet discussing this: https://twitter.com/c0nc0rdance/status/1248094573928251398/

And here's the paper: https://t.co/aSdFeLzopH?amp=1