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Pandemic personal consequences

Thora said:
Do you live with/care for someone vulnerable?
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Don’t think so, I live with my father who is 78 and has prostrate cancer but is very well, with a very low PSA count, so not having treatment.
Anyway, won’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
 
Orang Utan said:
Don’t think so, I live with my father who is 78 and has prostrate cancer but is very well, with a very low PSA count, so not having treatment.
Anyway, won’t look a gift horse in the mouth!
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Did they invite your father in at the same time? Or even recently?
 
So just been emailed and told I should keep shielding till 31st of March:D:facepalm:

I can’t help wonder what the thinking behind this is.
 
danny la rouge said:
I’ve just discovered my elderly mum won’t be having a vaccine because “it has aborted foetuses in it”. She’s a Wee Free, and must have got this from church. She won’t listen to reason and says she’ll send me “the facts”.

What can I send her?
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We all worked on her. I didn’t think we were getting anywhere but she’s just announced that she had it this afternoon! So massive turnaround.
 
We live in one of the post codes that's been doing community surge testing for the variants, so my wife decided we should be good citizens and get tests done to help out. We carried them out ourselves yesterday at home.

No symptoms obviously, as you're not supposed to use those tests if you've got them, and as expected I've got a negative result. My wife however has just received a positive result and she's freaking her nut. She hasn't been anywhere at all recently, and is insisting on getting another test. Of the two of us, I do all the shopping etc. and am the only one to do anything even moderately risky, as we both work from home.

Does anyone have any advice about potential false positives etc? She dropped a surge test kit over to a friend who's shielding after picking ours up yesterday, and she's petrified of potentially having infected him. She's booked another test for 9.30 this morning and am hoping the results come back asap.
 
strung out said:
We live in one of the post codes that's been doing community surge testing for the variants, so my wife decided we should be good citizens and get tests done to help out. We carried them out ourselves yesterday at home.

No symptoms obviously, as you're not supposed to use those tests if you've got them, and as expected I've got a negative result. My wife however has just received a positive result and she's freaking her nut. She hasn't been anywhere at all recently, and is insisting on getting another test. Of the two of us, I do all the shopping etc. and am the only one to do anything even moderately risky, as we both work from home.

Does anyone have any advice about potential false positives etc? She dropped a surge test kit over to a friend who's shielding after picking ours up yesterday, and she's petrified of potentially having infected him. She's booked another test for 9.30 this morning and am hoping the results come back asap.
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The surge testing is PCR tests I think? And the fact that you didn’t get the results until the next day suggests this too, so assuming that’s right: the official false positive rate (specificity) is 1 in 1000 (or lower), however real-world usage estimates are significantly higher, ranging from about 1 in 120 to as high as 1 in 25. Ie it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that this is a false positive result.

The only thing to do is what your wife is doing, and get a follow up test to find out, and in the meantime assume it is a real positive (ie isolation for you both, etc etc).

She is very unlikely to have infected your friend as long as she was following the guidance when she dropped it off, masks, 2m apart, not going indoors, minimal contact and so on, so I’d try not to get stressed about that if possible - it’s done anyway now, and not done recklessly, so she shouldn’t beat herself up about it, in my opinion.
 
prunus said:
The surge testing is PCR tests I think? And the fact that you didn’t get the results until the next day suggests this too, so assuming that’s right: the official false positive rate (specificity) is 1 in 1000 (or lower), however real-world usage estimates are significantly higher, ranging from about 1 in 120 to as high as 1 in 25. Ie it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that this is a false positive result.

The only thing to do is what your wife is doing, and get a follow up test to find out, and in the meantime assume it is a real positive (ie isolation for you both, etc etc).

She is very unlikely to have infected your friend as long as she was following the guidance when she dropped it off, masks, 2m apart, not going indoors, minimal contact and so on, so I’d try not to get stressed about that if possible - it’s done anyway now, and not done recklessly, so she shouldn’t beat herself up about it, in my opinion.
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Thanks - exactly my thought too! She's prone to quite bad anxiety unfortunately, so it's another thing to try and calm her down.
 
strung out said:
Thanks - exactly my thought too! She's prone to quite bad anxiety unfortunately, so it's another thing to try and calm her down.
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If she’s currently well, she may remain asymptomatic. You’re both relatively young! Hope that’s the case.

(I saw my in laws in their 70s, snogged my partner, and hugged my kids over Christmas- all whilst I had a low grade fever and a negative pcr, but actually had Covid. I didn’t pass on a single infection).
 
Edie said:
If she’s currently well, she may remain asymptomatic. You’re both relatively young! Hope that’s the case.

(I saw my in laws in their 70s, snogged my partner, and hugged my kids over Christmas- all whilst I had a low grade fever and a negative pcr, but actually had Covid. I didn’t pass on a single infection).
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Fingers crossed! New tests done this morning without incident. Hopefully we'll get two negatives, but we've got the mother in law cooking up multiple dishes at the moment to be delivered to us through the week if necessary.
 
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prunus said:
The surge testing is PCR tests I think? And the fact that you didn’t get the results until the next day suggests this too, so assuming that’s right: the official false positive rate (specificity) is 1 in 1000 (or lower), however real-world usage estimates are significantly higher, ranging from about 1 in 120 to as high as 1 in 25. Ie it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that this is a false positive result.
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I think you need the prevalence of the disease as well to calculate the probability any individual testing positive is actually positive don't you?

Say the false positive rate is 1 in 100, and also the chances of any given person having Covid are also 1 in 100, out of 100 people tested you'd expect 1 person to test positive because they had Covid (assuming no false negatives) but also 1 false positive (or 0.99 really). So the chances of someone testing positive actually having Covid would be about fifty/fifty in that situation.

Obviously those numbers are handy made up figures but i think you do typically get a much higher rate of false positives than the false positive rate indicates for that reason.


ETA: I think the specificity rate in probability terms would be the probability that the test returns a positive result given that the person doesn't have Covid. As the chance of a false positive would obviously be zero if they do have it. Where we don't know if they have it (so when the test is actually used) the specificity rate alone isn't enough information.
 
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Monkeygrinder's Organ said:
I think you need the prevalence of the disease as well to calculate the probability any individual testing positive is actually positive don't you?

Say the false positive rate is 1 in 100, and also the chances of any given person having Covid are also 1 in 100, out of 100 people tested you'd expect 1 person to test positive because they had Covid (assuming no false negatives) but also 1 false positive (or 0.99 really). So the chances of someone testing positive actually having Covid would be about fifty/fifty in that situation.

Obviously those numbers are handy made up figures but i think you do typically get a much higher rate of false positives than the false positive rate indicates for that reason.
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I'm interested to see what happens in the coming months as there will need to be a shift towards hospitalizations and away from R and case numbers.

We're currently doing 200-400K PCR tests a day, if 1 in 1000 is correct, we continue that, and the virus dies out completely (one can dream..) then it'll be impossible for us to go below ~200-400 daily cases and R will settle around 1.

At current trend rates of decreasing ~25% a week that would be about 3 months away, 10000 * (0.75**12). Less if the false positive rate is higher than 0.1%.
 
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