Hospitals use drug tests that return false positives from poppy seed bagels, decongestants and Zantac. Yet newborns are being taken from parents based on the results. Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now — pregnant with her...
It is easy to take an off-the-shelf monitoring device, slap a Covid-19 label on it, and tell the world the device can be used to help lift us out of a public health crisis. It is far more difficult to ensure the product can home in on the unique signature of this virus and imp...
The rise of thehighly transmissible delta variantaround the U.S.has increased demand forrapid antigen COVID-19 teststhat can be purchased from a pharmacywithout a prescription, used at home, school or work and that give results in 15 minutes. On Sept. 9, 2...
China PCR test orders soared before first reported COVID case Purchases of PCR tests in China’s Hubei Province surged months before the first official reports of a novel coronavirus case there, according to a report from researchers in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia. Oh go on. LET’...
Yes, it was an error at the lab. Yes, the 77 positive test results turned out to be false positives. So no, the N.F.L. was not dealing with a Covid-19 outbreak. Today onFreakonomics Radio: What happens if — or maybe when — there’s a real outbreak in the N.F.L. now that...
seeing someone else going through their news feed while studying is almost as distracting as engaging in such multitasking yourself. One study found that students within view of a multitasking peer scored 17% lower on tests than those who had no multitasking peer in their field of vision. This...
As the tests go well, it’s likely that Facebook will continue to roll out the feature. They’ve also said that they’re working on new, unique-to-virtual ad experiences that are not ready for tests just yet. We’ll keep an eye out for what these could be and we’ll give you ...
At the beginning of the pandemic, mortality counts may have underestimated the actual number of deaths because of COVID-19, as they did not include those who died at home or who died in a hospital but were not tested for SARS-CoV-2. In contrast, mortality will overestimate the number of...
On the other hand, with so many estimates we may find false positives just because of the sheer number of tests computed. We take two approaches to account for this multiple testing. First, for each family of outcomes, we adjust p-values using the Sidak-Bonferroni adjustment (Abdi, 2007)....
Even a test that is very good can give out more false positives than true positives when the prevalence of a disease is very low in a population. Let’s say you’re running a sero-survey among 1,000 people and only 4% of the population is actually infected. Presume the test correct...