Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

Re: Criticism of Stanford (Santa Clara County) study

I see…no discussion about the reasoning behind the criticisms.

The reasoning behind the main criticism—test specificity—is straightforward, IMO.

Mathematically, the confidence interval on any measurement of a true-positive rate will be unduly wide (in orders of magnitude) when the false-positive rate for the test in question is close in value to the underlying true-positive rate in the population being sampled.

There are two ways around this problem: i) develop a better (i.e. more specific) test; or ii) restrict the test in question to a population where the true-positive rate is thought to be much higher than the test's false-positive rate.