The reason the false positive rate is important here is that if you test 1,000,000 who don’t have CV with a 1% false positive rate you will claim that 10,000 people have it when none do. The false negative rate is an issue in containment, when you are trying to isolate everyone with the disease. It’s a problem, but a different problem in the context of the current article.
It’s good to know both numbers when comparing tests.
Plus to get a good statistical number for an individual, one may have to take a number of tests to get to the desired degree of confidence.