I've seen some messages on the list this week, so apologies if this has
already come up. But is the testing for SARS2 not like Challenger - we need
to look at the negatives as well as the positives?
In the UK, we are still doing more than three thousand negative tests each
day, and these give information about prevalence. A Bayesian model updating
approach seems logical to me, thence sampling of individuals to test would
be based on a prior probability and maximising the amount of information
which would be gained.
Blanket testing of people who have strong symptoms yields little
information and even healthworkers should stay at home as a precaution
while the service still has capacity. What would help is ?serology of those
who may now be immune, but that is not quite ready yet.
If people are desperate to talk about the data they should be asking for
the locations of the negative tests, as well as demographics / risk factors
of those tested, but that could be disclosive.
Tom
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