Coronavirus: Santa Clara County has had 50 to 85x more cases than we knew about

Re:Coronavirus: Santa Clara County has had 50 to 85x more ca... by Gibbon1 on Friday April 17, 2020 @09:00PM (#22904444)

My summary is when betting on any test with a low positive rate take under not the over.

Saying at least this many people have been infected, wrong. Better. At most this many people have been infected.

Reminds me of a survey 15 years ago that said something like 2-3% of black people approved of the job the president was doing. That 2-3% was more likely 'rectified noise'.

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Re:Coronavirus: Santa Clara County has had 50 to 85x more ca... by SpicyLemonZest on Saturday April 18, 2020 @12:39AM (#22905360)

In normal times, where there aren't critically urgent decisions to be made, that's the right approach. We don't have that luxury right now; we're continually charting the path forward, and if we don't have clean data then we'll need to chart it with unclean data.

And I think it's hard to argue that this study is worse than our existing case data, which is simply a daily aggregate of the number of new positive PCR tests labs report they've run. That's not even attempting to be a statistically valid estimate.

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