When a positive test proves to be incorrect, are they removed from the positive counts? Like when OH Gov Dewine tested positive on the "quick" test but then tested negative on the more thorough test - allegedly.This is a misunderstanding of all testing then.
The two most common types of tests that are used right now are PCR and ELISA.
PCR with matching nucleotide fragments to a known viral strand and ELISA that is mostly antigen testing like your rapid flu's. This will create a highlighted molecular attachment that lights up a test strip and is often computer read when you're doing mass testing.
Sort of like a pregnancy test, there are thresholds to determine whether that's a positive or negative. And as above you have confidence intervals for sensitivity and specificity.
The test are in fact red is binary at that point. The thresholds are not arbitrary but instead used to find statistics.
While I understand the concern that I could go and adjust my PCR threshold after the fact, that simply not the way this works. The tests are created to a certain standard and then packaged with that information along with them.
The testing currently used is of the exact same technology that we use for rapid flu and PCR flu.
The major problem is significant variation and all of the different manufacturers as we spun things up emergently.
In the case of rapid flu it still doesn't carry a wonderful percentages. But again as above this percentages are known and with a large enough aggregate you can create confidence intervals.
Now if you start seeing confidence intervals that say we might have 100,000 cases or 500,000 cases in that case you start to see the real breakdown in poor testing, if you determine that one of those numbers requires one societal response and the other one requires another societal response.
Also - when people test positive and then have to keep retesting until they come up with a negative before they can continue whatever it was they were doing, does each positive test register as a positive? So 5 positive tests in a week are counted as 5 new cases?