Re:A blood marker predicts who gets ‘breakthrough’ Covid
by raoa on Friday July 30, 2021 @11:37AM
(#28009123)
Yes. If I recall correctly the midseason positivity rates of flu tests is something like 40 percent, which suggests doctors are performing a legitimate differential diagnosis before prescribing flu tests. At no point ever have positivity rates been remotely close to this with coronavirus, even though it was far more prevalent.
The result of any individual test performed on a healthy asymptomatic person as part of a nondiscriminating mass screening regime is pure noise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
Read the section on drug testing to see what I mean. The probability of false positives when doing mass testing of mostly healthy individuals is much higher than you would intuit, so it's very possible that you never had the pathogen at all