As far as I can see, there is no way to use the false negative rate to find whether a positive test result is correct or incorrect. So your equation is suspicious.

Its completely wrong and misses out almost all the steps and data needed to perform the calculation.
You can't use a false negative to work out if a positive is real or not either. They're independent.
(And he's assuming we're using 1 test. We're not. The figures are now 50/50 split between 2 tests - PCR and LFD. Both of which have massively different sensitivity and specificity rates for starters!)

Here we go:-

https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/sensitivity-and-specificity

The proper maths required to find those figures (scroll down that page).

The main issue you'll find is the sensitivity/specificity data for PCR doesnt seem to be widely publicised.

Does anyone know the specific stated goal of continued lockdown according to those imposing it?

Are hospitals still overwhelmed? To what extent?

I heard no Nightingales are in use, and would have thought using them should be a higher priority strategy than continuing lockdown.

I think it's generally accepted by experts that Covid cannot be stopped, only slowed down, which is a misconception leading to some simplistic popular views, like anything which spread the virus is bad, with no link being made the the fact that this is mainly to stop hospital pressure.

In the meantime natural immunity is growing rapidly even according to "official" science, e.g.: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-graph-covid-herd-immunity.html

I don't think there is enough solid grounds to justify this continued violation of our civil liberties.

What data and predictions do people supporting continued lockdown base their position on?

In my lifetime I have watched the Precautionary Principle grow from a crank belief of 1970's (mostly) German environmentalists and Greens to an all pervasive legal and governmental approach that had been slowly destroying the economies and infrastructure of western countries. And in the last year destroyed large parts of the economy and civil society and stripped us of our basic human rights.

The political push has come from mostly affluent (white in the US) middle class voters who mostly work in the government / private business administrative state. With job titles that have been mostly created since WW2. So lots of "green" architects and very very few "green" builders for example In my experience very few radical greens have ever had a "real job". One that involved manual labor or shoveling cow shit. Lots of casual "non-jobs" thought. I have heard these people expound for hours about why the "Precautionary Principle" must be used for all parts of society yet none of them has any real idea where their food, housing, transport, or any other goods come from, the economics involved, or in almost all cases even a basic grasp of mathematics , science or technology. People with "real jobs" generally do. Because that kind of real life work environment is a great educator.

So in the word of Douglas Adams - the people most in favor of the Precautionary Principle are classic B Ark People.

For the current generation of the governing class the Precautionary Principle has been a godsend. Because like the voters above most of the current senior politics have never had any kind of "real job". In private business or elsewhere. The current generation of politicians are mostly career politicians. Study politics in uni, then job in thinktanks / lobby groups, then a SPAD then into an appointed or elected position. The senior medical administrators and public health officials have the same kind of career path. Most went into middle management soon after getting their degree. Very few have much clinical or research background. Just many decades of administration.

So all these people will try to avoid personal responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Or have any relevant talents or skills when a real disaster arises.

For the last few decades law after law, regulation after regulation, is passed using the Precautionary Principle to avoid having to take direct responsibility for events when things go wrong. As they always do. Given the way the media work the accidental death of a few people becomes a huge media cause celebre and the governing class scrambles to "do something". But if government policy using the Precautionary Principle kills tens of thousands of people and destroys the livelihood of millions that is rarely a direct problem for the governing class because the media can only personalize and sensationalize small stories of a few individuals, not the suffering of huge numbers of people. Especially if it was media hype that caused the initial small crisis to become a huge crisis. As is the case here.

I have not been joking when I say that the quickest way of ending the "COVID crisis" in the UK is to shutdown the BBC News Dept. They have been irresponsible in the extreme for the last year, every single story being politically motivated. A quick look at Fran Unworths C.V (who runs BBC News) will tell you all you need to know about the BBC News dept and its political motivations in the last year.

There has been no public health scientific justification for any government policy in the last year. None. The actual SARs CoV 2 pandemic has been about equivalent of the Swine Flu in 2009/2010. Same kind of clinical numbers. The only reason why we have a catastrophe now and did not have one in 2009 is purely politics. In 2009 the problem did not start in China, was not a probable lab escape, the US had a Democratic administration so the media was supine, and by the time it hit Europe the politicians were busy the the GFC so had more important things to worry about.

But this time around we had a dangerously irresponsible Chinese government, a Republican administration which the world media had a collective mental breakdown about, truly toxic Italian politics where local lockdowns were used as part of a vicious personal political vendetta, lame duck French and German leaders, and when the UK government initially tried to use actual science in its response the BBC was fighting for its existence and saw the pandemic as a way of trying to destroy the government. You can be 100% certain that if a Labour government had been in power the BBC coverage would have been completely different and they would have dropped the story as soon as they could. Probably by June last year.

So all the holes in the cheese lined up. As they say in plane crashes.

But the real villain here is the Precautionary Principle. A toxic idea that destroys all it touches. A very stupid idea for very stupid or incompetent people.

This is by far the best post I've seen on this site.

I call it the 'digging a hole test'. I.e the fewer holes you've dug in your life the more You're like what's described.

As far as I can see, there is no way to use the false negative rate to find whether a positive test result is correct or incorrect. So your equation is suspicious.

Its completely wrong and misses out almost all the steps and data needed to perform the calculation.
You can't use a false negative to work out if a positive is real or not either. They're independent.
(And he's assuming we're using 1 test. We're not. The figures are now 50/50 split between 2 tests - PCR and LFD. Both of which have massively different sensitivity and specificity rates for starters!)

Oh dear, how silly of me. I've clearly misunderstood. I mean, I didn't account for the many complicated factors, which presumably need to be known for each of the many laboratories performing the 1.5 million tests per day, and I also thought a simple quotient of the positive tests to the total tests would give the net rate! And to think that this very simple calculation could be compared to an average error rate of the two different types of tests is clearly unacceptable. With such base assumptions you'd think I was a physicist!
But on the other hand with the children back at school perhaps a nice mathematical exercise would be for them to work out the rate themselves!
So, if the government published testing statistics https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing shows that on the 18th March 1,437,257 viral tests were performed and that 322,869 of these tests were PCR and given an assumed error rate of 0.1% for the PCR and an error rate of 0.32% for all other tests calculate:
1) What is the expected number of errors of all the tests combined?
2) If a total of 6,332 tests were positive on that day what percentage of these positives can be expected to be in error?
3) Comment on the weekly averaged graphic below with regard to the impact on the positive rate when children returned to school.

There was never any justification for a lockdown in the first place, let alone continuing it now.
BTW I notice that yesterday the UK reported 5,587 positive out of a total of 1,437,257 tests done https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk So 5,587/1,437,257 is about 0.4%, which seems to be about the false positive rate being bandied about. If the false negative rate is the same as the false positive then this means that in reality there were probably around 0.4%*5,587 = 22 positive tests yesterday.
This seems so low that I feel I must be missing something. Perhaps some fancy modelling is needed?

Hang on a minute though - why are you applying the 0.4 multiplier twice?

I don't think he knows...