As it says in the title. How are they testing? Who gets tested? Are false positives being generated by the tests there, and if they are, how are they removing these from the data to report 0 cases? Retesting until they get a negative?
Because although false positives CAN be a problem there's a huge amount of hysteria by people with no understanding at all about the tests.
Firstly, you're supposed to have symptoms to book a test. People with covid symptoms are more like to have covid than those without.
Yes the symptom list is too vague but it DOES filter out a lot of false positives.
The fewer people with symptoms, the fewer people qualify for a test and fewer people get tested. So false positives are even fewer again.
Secondly if the result is borderline its resampled and retested to make sure.
They can still happen and will always happen *but* provided we're not doing random asymptomatic screening the problem is nowhere near as bad as some people make out.
Places such as Cayman haven't had a local case for many many months despite testing for example.
I think the message is behave yourselves boys and girls and look what freedoms we can give you back that we took from you illegally.....
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Very good and very important question. Ive asked this many places in relation to the small numbers in Australia.
The responses so far (with respect) don't really nail the conundrum.
Last week in WA Australia we had one positive hotel quarantine worker (false positive?) then no further positive cases amongst i dunno 30 000 tested - plus weeks before of community testing with no positives hence no false positives - so a false positive rate of 1 in 30, 000 1 in 50 000 1 in 100 000 or whatever (whilst a regular trickle of hotel quarantinees test positive) - seems worthy of further explaination whatever ones thoughts on skeptic/nonskeptic
Such was the level of statewide concern and public concern i think (but don't know) we would have heard more of people initially testing positive but being cleared on further testing. Unless they immediately rerun the test on a lower cycle and various other possibilities blah blah etc
PCR cant amplify what isn't there.
Yes you'll get some false positives regardless but everything from cross contamination to residual fragments etc drop hugely where theres 0 prevalence.
Don't forget tests are also run with multiple positive and negative controls to deduce the validity of each set of results so a lot of the false positives are caught on that stage and the test itself declared void and repeated.
