More on the Test for Covid

(Don Boudreaux)

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Unhappy with my fourth link in this post, Eric Kramer sent to me the following e-mail, on whose validity I’m not competent to offer a final assessment. But it seems to be the right thing to do to share his comment in full.

For some reason I can’t log in to comment at your site, so I’ll just send this along (reference to this post):

The suggestion above that covid pcr tests have a false positive rate of 80% to 97% is obviously wrong.  The overall positivity rate – which includes both false and true positives – has been between 4% and 22% since testing began (and mostly between 4% and 10%).

I suspect your antipathy to covid policy led you to be less than appropriately critical of a story that clearly required some degree of skepticism.  Passing along nonsense like this cannot be justified simply by noting that you are not an expert – it’s an academic version of Trump passing along lies and saying “many people are saying”.  To be true to your liberal values I hope you will flag this issue for your readers, or remove this apparently bogus story from your blog entirely.

Eric