It took very little time to put it together. Everything on it is factually accurate. However, it took me three months to get all the bans on it removed by which point I had given up on the notion of providing sober commentary instead of constant breathless panic mode. At this point, I do not know if it still appears in any blacklists.
The simple fact was that with 5% of the population infected, a 2.5% false positive probability, and 10% false negative probability, fully 34.5% of all positive test results will be false. So, a lot of resources will be wasted in tracking, restraining, and constraining people who don't need to be and their absence from the labor market will have further repercussions. Sure, if 95% of the population is infected, the false positive rate will be really low, but then there is really no point to a massive testing infrastructure: Just assume everyone is infected instead of dealing with the fact that 33.9% of the negative results will be false.
Testing asymptomatic people repeatedly will likely not provide a net benefit beyond assuaging the fears of the perpetually panicked.
This is a recent example I am comfortable discussing in public.
[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/false-positive-false-negative-simu...
[2]: https://www.covid2020.icu/false-positive-false-negative-simu...
But that ignores a major factor, which is that testing isn't uniformly distributed. It's inevitably going to be skewed towards people who are more likely to be infected. That means the true number will be less than 7%.
The danger with testing really isn't the false positive rate. It's the false negatives.
Notes: https://archive.ph/hwbSf
> Lateral flow tests have a 0.3% false positive rate
In the lab ... which is not the same as the real world.
> which is that testing isn't uniformly distributed.
The comments were in the context of efforts to test everyone at least once or twice a week whether symptomatic or not.
> The danger with testing really isn't the false positive rate.
Only if you assume there is no cost to false positives.
No, I quoted the real-world value intentionally. The lab value is 0.06%. Depending on when you wrote the page it's understandable that you might not have had access to that yet, but it turns out that LFT's are really, really good at not throwing a false positive.
> Only if you assume there is no cost to false positives.
No, you don't need to assume there is no cost to false positives, only that it is less than the cost of false negatives in aggregate. And that's not hard: false negatives cause infections which compound exponentially, whereas false positives have a linear cost. That alone would make false negatives more costly, but when you account for the probability of each it's really not close.
> false positives have a linear cost.
That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do is linear in the number of false positives. They are hard to observe and record because they are mostly in foregone productive activities and negative impacts on mental health, but that does not make them go away.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-oran...
The real world results, as measured, showed a 0.3% false positive rate. If your [1] has a measurable effect, it's included in that 0.3%.
> > false positives have a linear cost.
> That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do is linear in the number of false positives.
It's not hard at all. It literally follows from the problem setup. If one person has 4 contacts, and each of those contacts has 4 more, and you quarantine all of them, then that's 17 people quarantined from a single positive test. That "17" is a linear constant. There's no feedback mechanism: one positive test leads to 17 quarantines only, and you're done. It's linear. It might have a higher constant factor than you personally think is justified, but that's a very different question.
Try as I did, I can't find a source for this claim. The best I could find was[1] which seems to indicate a 1.1% false positive rate for people without symptoms (keep in mind my argument is against widespread, unconditional testing). PCR results in the real world seem to vary a lot, but a 3% false positive rate seems appropriate.
> 17 people quarantined from a single positive test. That "17" is a linear constant.
That is a faulty argument. You are assuming total costs of a trace/quarantine regime are linear in the number of people prevented from participating in society and productive activities.
[1]: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-likely-positive-latera...
The specificity of the test was recorded as 99.68% - the
overall false positive rate was 0.32%, although this was
lowered to 0.06% in a lab setting.
Not to me. Again, first page of google: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... puts an _upper_ bound on the PCR false positive rate of 0.08%, and that would require all the positives in that survey to have been false. And that's a real-world result across 208,730 samples.
But given the existence of LFTs and how cheap and immediate they are, I don't think anyone's talking about population-wide PCR testing anyway.
> You are assuming total costs of a trace/quarantine regime are linear in the number of people prevented from participating in society and productive activities.
For the proportion of the population removed at any given time? As close to linear as makes no difference, yes. Is your argument that there's a quadratic factor in network effects? You haven't explained what your cost model actually is. For your argument to work you need those costs to follow an exponential curve, and there's just no mechanism for that to happen.
If anything, all the conspiracy nonsense being stoked from shadowy organizations can be seen as serving the same purpose as an agent provocateur. "Look, these people will obviously believe anything, no matter how ridiculous or unsupported by empirical data. We'd better constrain all information for their own good." Just like a provocateur breaking windows at a protest is used as an excuse to arrest everyone.
Now that's a conspiracy theory I can get behind.