Ministers today scrambled to play down fears that ‘false positives’ could cripple the country after Boris Johnson unveiled a plan to screen the whole population for coronavirus twice a week.
The PM has announced a huge expansion of testing with free rapid kits made available to everyone in England from this Friday.
Mr Johnson said the multi-billion pound move can help the return to normality by picking up asymptomatic cases and identifying local outbreaks faster.
There are no asymptomatic cases, only false positives. The more people you test, the more false positives and therefore the more “cases” and the more unnecessary panic. If people are ill, they go to bed. That’s how you deal with a virus like this. If they are seriously ill, they may need hospital treatment, but the vast majority do not.
But concerns were immediately raised as when used on that scale the tests could wrongly label tens of thousands of people a week as having Covid – forcing them to isolate and get more reliable PCR checks to show they are clear.
Given its propensity for false positives, I’d hardly call the PCR more reliable. Besides, if you aren’t ill, there isn’t a problem.
Of course this will fail. I very much doubt that I am alone in refusing to have anything to do with this insanity. The claim that every adult will be tested is already false.
No tests, no cases. If you don’t feel sick, you should not agree to be tested and most certainly should not test yourself.
And if you feel unwell, go to bed and stay there until you feel better.
‘Given its propensity for false positives, I’d hardly call the PCR more reliable. Besides, if you aren’t ill, there isn’t a problem.’
I seem to recall that the LFT is 0.23%( Porton Down numbers I think) and the PCR FPR rate is unknown, but PCR usually around 0.7%, so yeah no sure what they mean there.
They rolled out the LFT here in scouserland, PCR came in around 700ish cases per 200k, so about 0.7%, and LFT around 0.25%. These are from memory so could be wrong but I can try and source these if needs be.
So what they claimed at the time was that the LFT produced a lot of false negatives rather than the rather obvious conclusion that PCR test is mostly false positives.
Or that the truth could be somewhere in between the two. There is no hold standard test other than agar plate and sputum I think and that’s not practical on this scale. They immediately inferred the worst possible case they could from the stats they garnered.
Trouble is most people are crap at maths, I can just see that instantly.
It’s also worth pointing out that testing on this scale isn’t useful when background prevalence of infection is around the FPR of the testand that’s always been the case.
Its not going to find anything useful, we’ve known this for months. I give up.
If only they put all these plans to test everyone regularly for cancer then they might actually save some lives and achieve something
This seems to be newspeak at work “More testing improves results” It has been applied in almost all fields, but without any apparent benefit that I can see – unless you count increased cost and bureaucracy as successes. As scarface says, if it were only done where there is a known, serious need, but then something would have to be done.
What happened to the vaccination being the way out of this?
Keep up, old bean. The goalposts just moved.
@LR
Spot on. The virus has been so insignificant since last summer that vast majority of results have been false positives. The Liverpool mass test showed us this when it was buried, as did Uni and school children testing
Yet, once again, Boris follows the socialist path of repeating failure in deluded hope ‘it will work this time’. No Boris, it won’t, all it does is waste more £Billions when Gov’t borrowing £ One Billion per day. Although stocking fear is his aim, not our health and well-being and it will do that “50,000 new cases today”
Stop fecking testing, problem gone
A three parter worth reading
Throwing this in as informative
Reaction to Boris Johnson’s Easter Monday Speech from Conservatives
No resurrection of life permitted. Want to leave? Forbidden. Want to enter? You’re welcome
Cast your mind back to January last year (or earlier). Now imagine going to your doctor (remember going to your doctor instead of a phone call?) and saying “One of my colleagues is off work with the flu, can you give me a test to see if I have it and need to take time off work?” How loud would the laughter be?
Why are we testing healthy people and making them stay at home?
And now they want to give vaccines to children….
God help me if they even try it on my child.