No, 90% Of Coronavirus Tests Are Not 'False Positives' And This Is Why
What at first seems like an incredibly alarming statistic has been circulating on social media, promoted by a small and vocal group of journalists – at least 91% of coronavirus tests in the UK are “false positives”.
If true, the implications would be staggering – the actual scale of the pandemic in the UK is less than a tenth of what we thought and the government has just announced further lockdown restrictions based on faulty data.
This claim has been seized upon by, among others, radio show host Julia Hartley-Brewer...
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: Matt Hancock told me on @talkRADIO that the False Positive Rate of Covid tests in the community is "under 1%". Sounds good, doesn't it? WRONG!
An FPR of 0.8% when the virus prevalence is so low means that at least 91% of "Covid cases" are FALSE POSITIVES. https://t.co/f2Z85Lj4cj— Julia Hartley-Brewer (@JuliaHB1) September 18, 2020
Journalist Toby Young, who in an article said health secretary Matt Hancock was “keeping this knowledge from the public for nefarious reasons”...
If Whitty and Vallance had taken questions, I hope someone would have asked them what the projected number of cases would be on 13th Oct if you discount the 91% of “cases” that are false positives. I make it 4,410. pic.twitter.com/qyyAFXCj4P
— Toby Young (@toadmeister) September 21, 2020
And even a Tory MP...
The government advisers today need to tell us how they are going to stop false test results distorting the figures. How are they going to calculate an accurate R Number? Data needs improving to improve decisions.
— John Redwood (@johnredwood) September 21, 2020
But there’s one problem – it’s simply not true.
So where did it come from?
Back in July, professor Carl Heneghan, director for the centre of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University and outspoken critic of the current UK response to the pandemic, wrote a piece titled: “How many Covid diagnoses are false positives?”
This article explains, in a nutshell, how tests...
