False negatives on a test like this could potentially mean hundreds or thousands of infectious people in the crowd
Thousands of infectious people in the crowd?
How many are in this hypothetical crowd overall for there to be "hundreds or thousands" of false negative tests within it? Please lay off the Covid hyperbole, there's more than enough of that in the mainstream media already.
You can take your pick in which information you read and believe, by there's quite a few articles, blogs and papers regarding the quick antigen tests that put their false rate at anything from 20% up to 50%.
Even if the false negative rate was just 5% (far lower than anything I've actually seen documented), then a 15,000 crowd testing negative could have 750 infected people, or over 2,000 across the weekend.
Based on that, I don't think the reference to "hundreds or thousands" is hyperbole
No. If the false negative rate was 5% and
every one of those 15K people had COVID then you've got 750 infected people undetected. The current positive test rate in the UK (I know this was not in the UK, but it's a guide at least) is around 7-8% and this rate is overwhelmingly taken from a sample of people who need to be tested for medical or professional reasons so it is safe to assume that the overall rate among the wider, seemingly healthy population is much lower, let's say half that, so 4%. So out of your daily crowd of 15K you probably have no more than 600 infected individuals, if accuracy rate is 95% and 5% of those infected individuals falsely test negative, then that leaves us with 30 infected individuals mingling obliviously. It's 30 too many, but it's not hundreds and certainly not thousands.
If, as you say, the false negative rate on this type of test is as high as 20-50% then this is a non-starter and should go back to the drawing board.
Always a Wasp
Topic: Discussion with the Ticket Office re the coming season(s) (Read 2922 times)