“My concern is that testing a low prevalence population will result in many false positives unless the test nears 100% specificity. A test our lab is evaluating has 96% clinical specificity. If antibody prevalence is 1%, 80% of positive tests will be false positives.”
I can’t explain this but see such claims often
Dr Stephen McColgan, with Vivera Pharmaceuticals talking about the antibodies testing kits, that his company makes.
He said Germany is using same/similar tests, as are several other countries.
Also said that Trump is trying to cut through FDA redtape, but, it’s just a tough thing to do :(
“A test our lab is evaluating has 96% clinical specificity. If antibody prevalence is 1%, 80% of positive tests will be false positives.”
The test is accurate 96% of the time, wrong 4% of the time. So if 1% of the people have antibodies, you’ll get “1” (0.96) accurate positives and “4” (3.84) false positives. 80% of your positives will be false positives.
“Fortunately” prevalence will be much, much larger than 1% by the time this is over. But I’d rather have 80% false positives than any number of false negatives.