Idk, sorry. My post was a joke. Confusion is understandable. We get a lot of conflicting information.
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I THINK that if you have a positive antibody screen that itās accurate, but a negative test isnāt helpful for bunch of reasons - but we have some smarter guys here that should weigh in.
MM MD
All the bars in the West Palm/Jupiter area have been open for like a week now.
I went surfing today and there were 3 other people in the water after a while 2 people got out and it was just me and one guy and he immediately asked me āhowās your pandemic going?ā and so I replied like a normal human being would and said Iām doing well trying to exercise more and stay positive despite not having a job, and he replied with a never ending string of bizarre conspiracies that I did my best not to comment on and just tried to deflect from until more people paddled out and he finally left. This is all the weird shit I remember him telling me over like 20 minutes when we were alone in the lineup LOL
The first thing he said was that dr. fauci sued some doctor from San Diego to keep her quiet, and he said her five years were up so she wrote a book on all this. Something like he sued her and stole her patent and rat dna (He has a whole detailed explanation about this and remarked that itās like being back in high school science class again) gives you cancer is all the SARS And H1N1 vaccines, and how thereās some bill that allows government scientists to profit off these drugs. You see fauci hid the cancer in the rat dna part of all the vaccines starting in like 2008. Itās all about the currency. They made a documentary about this. It was banned on YouTube (it was at this point I realized he was talking about plandemic which I havenāt seen yet) and they kept taking it down because they didnāt want the truth to get out. There was a whole bunch more but ya it was scary lol thankfully I just kind of smiled and nodded until he left but it was definitely weird that he would be that out there and also that willing to start sharing bizzare shit so quickly instead of just talking about the weather like normal people.
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The positive predictive value (probability that a positive result is a true positive) depends on the prevalence of the virus in the population. If prevalence is low, PPV will be low. Like 50% for a prevalence of a few percent but much better as the prevalence increases.
ETA this is assuming values of sensitivity and specificity typical for these kinds of tests. Definitions for these terms are links in the wiki article.
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Right, IIRC the antibody tests they were giving early on had a false positive rate (absolute, not relative/proportional to positive results) of 5%, which given the percentage of people assumed to have had it, meant that if yours came back positive it was basically a coinflip to be correct. Not too helpful.
Anyone remember back when we couldnāt gather in large groups?
Get a vial (not pinprick) test from a reputable company like LabCorps - supposedly theyāre up to like 99.9% specificity - meaning 1 in 1000 false negatives. I think the FDA banned all the pinprick tests anyway.
False positives have never been 100% clear to me, but most things I read seem to imply that a false positive means you have antibodies for something very similar - which presumably could help fend off covid if you do get it? Maybe?
The downside of counter-culture stuff like surfing, veganism, off-the-grid people, etc. This stuff seems so common.
Iām old enough to remember when boredsocialās wife was the debbil for picking up a free coffee at Starbucks on her way to work.
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Right I get that, but stillā¦ I sometimes have to walk past some elderly people who live in my building. Iām not at all worried about them giving me the virus, but would feel terrible if I gave it to them. So thatās why I wear a mask
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Doesnāt specificity in this case mean the ability to distinguish between CV-19 antibodies and antibodies from other coronaviruses? Meaning 1 in 1000 false positives not negatives. I think accuracy measures false negatives. Iām only mentioning this because I was confused for a while and looked into it. (Itās entirely possible that Iām still confused.)
On the other hand you can be confident a negative result is accurate if the prevalence is low. Here are some specs for one test.
Yes, probably.
Yeah thatās the part thatās hard for me to unpack. I donāt want 350,000 people to die. But, letās say locking everyone in their house for the rest of the year saved all 250k of those that would have died otherwise. Is that worth? Very tricky stuff. Probably if I was being totally honest, Iād say that a slow burn to 350k deaths over the rest of the year but taking exponential growth/bring out your dead off the table, I might be ok with it to keep things relatively normalized? God maybe Iām the problem.
The answer has to be thread the needle and minimize and keep running out the clock? I feel sort of rudderless at this point now that things arenāt red alert holy shit shelves are empty, but still clipping away popping off people at a decent clip.
The only reason we are left with all bad options is the complete lack of national response from the beginning. UBI + a stricter lockdown would have reduced the case numbers to a more manageable number where you could test/trace. As is itās basically just going to be what it is. Which is most people just ignoring hundreds of thousands dead and hoping it doesnāt happen to them or someone they love.
We havenāt had a single day with less than 18k new cases since March. And now the rate of decrease we earned through the lockdowns has stalled out and we might be slowly heading the other way. Meanwhile everyone is gradually adding more and more risk. No telling where that gets us.
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For some reason Iāve always heard in the context of false negatives. Or maybe I meant sensitivity I dunno.
False positives seem to always be mentioned as some kind of similar antibody but never just compete out fo the blue fail
And it would of saved us money.
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Specificity and sensitivity donāt say anything about reasons a test may give an incorrect result, theyāre just the percentage of times that happens.