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Originally Posted by jfman
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Not a conclusive test.
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The scheme has faced opposition from some experts who doubted it made sense as one-off measure, or pointed to the antigen tests used, which are less accurate then the laboratory PCR tests and may thus return more false negatives and false positives.
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I wouldn't call a report in
The Lancet "the false positives brigade".
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The current rate of operational false-positive swab tests in the UK is unknown; preliminary estimates show it could be somewhere between 0·8% and 4·0%.
This rate could translate into a significant proportion of false-positive results daily due to the current low prevalence of the virus in the UK population, adversely affecting the positive predictive value of the test.
Considering that the UK National Health Service employs 1·1 million health-care workers, many of whom have been exposed to COVID-19 at the peak of the first wave, the potential disruption to health and social services due to false positives could be considerable.
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