Just started thinking to myself how often doctors misdiagnose shit.
What’s the likelihood that if a person has symptoms that are similar to covid-19, but it really turns out to be something more benign like the common cold or even allergies?
There are test kits for diagnose. Some work better than others. With time they will be improved.
Testing-wise, it seems like it’s much more common to get a false negative for covid-19 than it is to get a false positive.
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Test kits are designed this way on purpose. Better safe than sorry.
Edit: Think I misread your post. It should be the other way around?
Other way around. False negatives are no good cuz then the diseased are set free to roam amongst the healthy unawares.
That’s what I mean. They should indicate more likely that you have it to be sure someone with a light/recent infection would not fall through.
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That’s why they require 3 negatives before ending quarantine.
For screening some amount of false positive rate is acceptable if it reduces the false negative rate.
Too many false positives will however make screening counterproductive ,so there’s a balance .
Usually there’ll be one to two more confirmatory tests, as mentioned above .
Rest assured the test kits and diagnostics will rapidly improve for this disease and that will help immensely in containing it. There are hundreds of companies and labs working on it worldwide
We don’t have antibody rapid tests for it yet, that will come next (also this one is trickier than most due to need for sample from lower down in the throat , the current tests by rt PCR are actually very sensitive and state of the art, collecting the sample and the way the virus titer changes is challenging). You could get an antibody rapid test which would be super handy but it wouldn’t catch the virus as quickly as the RT PCR test because your body needs time to recognise and make antibodies against it. In fact you can have antibodies and have cleared the virus already so you’d still need to do an RT PCR test to see if you were still infected. The antibody test is just really handy to do quickly to get an idea of the spread, you can just take a blood sample , potentially a saliva sample too. .
Well there’s one more Im aware of which is a virus antigen test (it can recognise bits of proteins specific to that coronavirus), that would be able to tell you if you currently have the virus. A rapid viral antigen test would be super useful. Hopefully they’ll start making them within a couple of months or so. That’s ridiculously fast approval but hey we need it.
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