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I get why they’re doing this, but I fear as a society we’ve learned the wrong lessons about testing.

These tests have a pretty high failure rate. That’s probably ok for social level spread tracking (with wide error bars) or low volume contact tracing (where quarantining a few extra people is worth it). It’s far better than nothing of course, but it’s also far short of what we expect from something like a pregnancy test.

But as a means to sign people off as safe to travel? Yeah, not so much. So many people have had the “one negative test so I can go party” only to discover what a false negative is.



> These tests have a pretty high failure rate.

The rapid ones maybe, the PCR ones are quite accurate.


PCR is sensitive, but at the cycle thresholds most labs use, it is not specific.




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