Question

In regards to the Coronavirus .state  why false negative matters to you (i.e., why you need to be careful) when taking a medical test

Answer 1

Negatives will affect badly on your confidence level where the basic defence to these kind of pandemics.

When applied to a broad swath of the population, a test’s performance can be surprisingly counterintuitive. It can perform worse than expected, producing a potentially large proportion of false positives in populations less likely to have the disease. Consider a scenario with Covid-19 testing in an asymptomatic or mild population with 1 in 51 people infected (about 2%). Assume the test is always positive in individuals with the disease but falsely positive 10% of the time (which would be superior to many medical tests in use). The chance that someone with a positive test result is actually infected is under 20% (1 in 6).

As systematic testing is performed in the general population, patients less likely to have the disease including asymptomatic individuals without known exposures will be tested. A large number of false positive results would lead to an overestimate of the number of asymptomatic cases in many regions.

A large number of false positives could also overestimate the contribution of asymptomatic spread to the dynamics of the pandemic. False positives could also decimate the health care workforce if workers were inadvertently and unnecessarily quarantined and kept from seeing patients. The magnitude of the false positive and false negative problem remains unclear. Policymakers are aware of this potential issue, but early data on the sensitivity and specificity of tests in Wuhan, China, have been retracted.

testing is great for abstract epidemiological study of how a disease is progressing through a population. Testing is also very helpful in removing hysteria and politics from large scale response planning.

But if future COVID-19 specific drugs have possible significant adverse reactions…There will want two factor confirmation if possible instead of just relying solely on RNA reagent based tests. Specifically expert electron microscope confirmation as that eyeballs on virus identification is probably the most accurate follow-up confirmation of a positive test result.

False informations or false results will mentally put you down, but be confident and try to fight for life. We will overcome..