I feel very distraught about what is happening w COVID in India. At moment, I am distraught (and extremely sad) bc this was 100% predictable.

Why in this pandemic do we keep “waiting to see” before we act. Once we are seeing, it’s always too late.

We haven’t learned a thing.
Yes. Of course we learned how to make vaccines and start getting them distributed. We have learned some things.

But we haven’t yet learned how to reasonably anticipate and make assessments based on what we already know is most likely to occur or w the urgency it requires.
In the tweet I am referring to nations, particularly high income nations just now starting to say “oh, we should do something”. And them as nations, scramble to make an appearance.

We could have done a lot this past year, for ourselves and the world. We’ve done the bare minimum

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More from @michaelmina_lab

3 May
This is how progress is made:

A new study about to start in UK.

Can rapid tests each morning following contact w a #COVID19 positive individual be used instead of a 14 day quarantine.

I’ve been pushing for this type of study/policy for a year.

gov.uk/government/new…

1/
Why is this important??

Quarantines take a major toll on individuals. Physical and emotional. Most contacts in quarantine never become positive and there are multiple contacts for each positive.

2/
A quarantine of an uninfected individual should be considered with the same concern as false positives - and false positives sure have gotten a LOT of attention. But unlike a false positive, you currently can’t really get a “confirmatory test” to help get out of quarantine.

3/
Read 7 tweets
30 Apr
To: Scientists, Doctors and anyone writing OpEds or Making Policy Decisions about tests

PLEASE NOTE:

The number of False Positive tests does *NOT* go up when prevalence of #COVID19 goes down.

The number of False Positives is the SAME regardless of high vs low prevalence.

1/
This idea keeps getting thrown around in OpEds and by decision makers - worried false positives sky rocket once disease drops.

But if you have 10 False Pos per 100,000 tests when incidence is high, you’ll have ~10 False Positives per 100,000 tests when incidence is low.

2/
What changes is not the number of false pos results, but the fraction of all pos that may be false

Of course even if false pos rate is 0.0001 (about that of newer rapid Ag tests), if there is zero Covid, then sure, 100% of positives will be false. But it’s still only 1 in 10,000
Read 6 tweets
29 Apr
UK ppl should be concerned that head of @RoyalStatSoc #COVID19 diagnostics grp is inaccurately stating facts about testing-Intentionally conflating false positives w positive predictive value (totally different) to make rapid tests look bad #badscience
1/
In the tweet above, to get false positive rate you need to have the number of true negatives in the denominator. If you fail to do that, you aren't measuring the false positive rate. It's a totally different number. Studies show false positive rates for many tests <0.1%.

2/
In the first tweet I said "UK ppl should be concerned"... but c'mon @RoyalStatSoc - why allow this to continue. He's been stating falsehoods and bending stats or performing flagrantly unacceptable/unpublishable analyses for months now. Sowing confusion. How is this helpful?
Read 5 tweets
23 Apr
Thread: On costs $$ of at-home Rapid Tests

The US government earmarked 10's of billions of dollars for testing. This was a great move!

But why isn't this money being used to make frequent rapid testing more available to the consumer?

Testing is a public health good.

1/x
The government should follow the same successful playbook for frequent testing as it has for vaccines: pay for the tests themselves (as it did for the vaccine) or buy down the price at retail (as it does for the administration for the vaccine itself). 

2/x
Why is this important?

1. Children still aren't vaccinated
2. Healthcare workers and others who are vaccinated can still contract the virus (and may be able to pass it on)
3. Less than 50% of US adult population is fully vaccinated

Testing is our eyes to see this virus

3/x
Read 5 tweets
22 Apr
Following recovery from COVID19, people remain PCR positive for weeks. These ppl do not transmit virus and needn’t isolate **even if only first tested w PCR after recovery

PCR is not specific for the transmission period nor for requiring isolation

1/

ja.ma/3ehHDCI
This simple fact - that lab based PCR is not specific to what matters most in a pandemic - whether someone needs to isolate - has been entirely missed in this pandemic and unfortunately at the expense of tests that are fast, accessible AND specific to the infectious period

2/
I hope regulatory / public health agencies understand that public health is not the same as medicine, and the tests needed for public health are different and must meet entirely different metrics to be effective.

@K_G_Andersen and I cover this here.

3/

science.sciencemag.org/content/371/65…
Read 4 tweets
19 Apr
Articles like this continue to miss that rapid tests can be used multiple times in a row and paired together for rapid confirmation - immediately.

Bayes theorem is great, but let’s update our thinking around tests when we invoke it.

theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
I want to clarify this 👆is a very nice and well written article by @TomChivers - pertaining to conventional one-off testing

Frequent accessible testing is however different & repeated use of one or more tests must be factored in to sens/spec calculations & Bayes probabilities
Since false pos are of concern bc they mean ppl isolate when they do not need to, then w that definition @TomChivers it would be interesting if you follow up w a piece on the VERY high false pos PCR rate bc many/most PCR positives are detected AFTER the isolation window passed
Read 4 tweets

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