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Prescribing Cycling; Temperature Checks; False Positives; Choirs and Covid-19

Inside Health

CHAPTER

Is There a False Positive Test?

As a disease gets rarer in the population, the chance of having a false positive test starts to rise. Some tests are reporting that they are 90 point nine % accurate while i've just described a test that has specificity of 99 point nine%. Now some of the tests round the world are actually much cheaper, delivered in much speedier times and their specificity is about 95 percent. So they have a huge number of false positives at low prevalence, and that's a real concern.

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