Not all tests are made equal, and tests have different performances. How you interpret a test depends crucially on the community in which it's being carried out. People struggle with terms like false positive and false negative r because everyone gets them mixed up. And when there's lots of virus floating around, the problem becomes false negatives. So only these really tricky issues can be resolved - they're so deeply unintuitive and so deeply difficult to understand.
With data on the Covid-19 pandemic changing shape with every new outbreak and new mutation, it's a complex task to make sense of where the story of the virus will head next. David Spiegelhalter is chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and an expert on crunching figures in order to understand successes and failures. His new book Covid by Numbers, co-written with Anthony Masters, seeks to shine a spotlight on the UK's handling of the pandemic. In this episode he speaks with the virologist and host of The Naked Scientist podcast Dr Chris Smith.
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