But, because positive people are almost always retested here we can actually examine this question more robustly. Of the 226 positive results, one was later retested and found to be a false positive!
To calculate test specificity, we take TN/(TN+FP) = 607333/(607333+1) = 99.99984%
To put it another way, very roughly 1 false positive test per million tests done
This very quickly and easily shows why the idea that most COVID-19 positive tests are false positives is simply misinformation and mathematically impossible
If 1%, or even 0.1%, of all tests done were false positives, we would expect to have seen 1,000s of positive COVID-19 results in NSW in the last month rather than a few hundred
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Interesting new preprint on #LongCovid. Some take-homes:
- ~14% of people
- can last months
- associated with +symptoms, previous respiratory disease, gender, age
- not associated with metabolic disease (mostly) medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
To me, this is the most interesting table. You can look through and see what is and isn't associated with PCR-positive Long COVID
Not unsurprising that people who experience worse symptoms in their initial COVID-19 infection are more likely to suffer from #LongCovid
Now, I think it's reasonable to assume that the proportion of people who die after being infected by COVID-19 will fall over time. It's probably true that being infected today is less deadly than earlier this year
That being said, I'm quite skeptical of the evidence presented. This story seems to claim that death rates have dropped ENORMOUSLY, while I would expect something more in the range of a relative 10-20% drop (say from 25% to 20%)
Depressingly, there is little evidence that the pre-existing immunity from the first wave has substantially dampened viral spread, despite earlier hopes
Worth noting that Tegnell himself predicted that Sweden would reach "herd immunity" by mid-May originally, until serology studies proved that this was wrong
People have been asking me to debunk this thread "proving" that COVID-19 deaths are false positives by correlating things, but instead I thought I'd simply list a few things that are more well correlated than this