Let's just go back to the original claim here, that these localised outbreaks aren't real at all, but are merely the consequence of a non-zero false positive rate and increased testing (for unexplained reasons) in a handful of northern towns and cities. Suppose the FPR is 1% - I have no idea whether this is accurate, but let's say it is - and that this is consistent across all the batches of test material being used in the country. Now obviously you aren't going to declare a new outbreak based purely on the number of positive test results in a given area, because that depends entirely on how many tests have been done. You know that if you test ten times as many people, you're going to get ten times as many positive results, for a given true infection rate plus a given FPR.Because they ramped up testing there.
I refuse to believe that even Matt Hancock is too stupid to realise this. (Chris Grayling would be a different matter.)
Well are you going to be coy or are you going to tell us what the big secret plan is?It's not stupidity, no...you have any idea what they're playing at?
Well are you going to be coy or are you going to tell us what the big secret plan is?
yeah but you can't infer those assumptions out of a false positive rate - how accurate is the test (specifically how "sensitive" - i.e., what is the ratio of true positives to positives)? that would tell you how many ppl who tested positive have it. I doubt anyone thinks that number is 0Doesn't it though? I don't remember stats that well but looking at the definition of FP it's the number of wrong positives as a ratio of the total number of negatives. In other words if you had a population with no disease and a false positive ration of 1 percent then that would mean you get 1 percent positive on the test.
it means that the expectation of a false positive is 1%. it doesn't mean that, if you have an overall test result of 1%, 100% of those results are false.
No but it does mean that the number of positives is the same as the expected number of false positives.it means that the expectation of a false positive is 1%. it doesn't mean that, if you have an overall test result of 1%, 100% of those results are false.
This sounds plausible to me. So this would basically mean that there is a (racist) assumption at the heart of the decision making. And they've maybe picked some northern towns as places where local lockdown needs to happen, cos there's an assumption about spread in non-White and poor areas. But they cannot really blatantly say that. So it's up to some whistle blower to actually reveal it. Unless it's not what's happening at allI think the likeliest explanation is that they're trying to fashion a narrative that implies that they have been in control of the virus rather than flailing about, panic-stricken, while the virus does whatever it was going to do anyway.
Well they've fucked that up good and proper, haven't they?I think the likeliest explanation is that they're trying to fashion a narrative that implies that they have been in control of the virus rather than flailing about, panic-stricken, while the virus does whatever it was going to do anyway.