Are Covid tests are only 70% accurate at picking up positives.

[AnxiousNoMore]

Washington Examiner article excerpts below suggesting only 70% sensitivity. They don't mention specificity %. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/health-experts-believe-1-in-3-infected-patients-getting-negative-coronavirus-test-results
Health experts think upward of 30 per cent of patients infected with the coronavirus are receiving negative test results.

“The whole testing field is in flux,” Bill Miller, a physician and epidemiologist at the Ohio State University, told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “The thing that is different this time is most of these tests are going through a really rapid validation process. As a result, we can’t be completely confident in how they will perform.”

Mike Lozano, a Florida-based executive for Envision Healthcare Corp., said that he believes the currently available coronavirus tests are likely only accurate about 70 per cent of the time.

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Chris Smalley, a Kentucky-based doctor, said the 70 per cent estimate is becoming a popular guess by doctors as to how accurate the coronavirus tests are. He added that he has seen several patients test negative while still showing symptoms of the coronavirus and needing extended hospital stays.

“A false negative is problematic because it tells the patient they don’t have the virus,” Craig Deligdish, a Florida oncologist, said.

[specialmom]

Probably everything has potential for false negatives.  And false positives. But if you are sick and get a negative, you are still sick and isolation is still important to protect other people.  Looking forward to the antibody test that is coming.  

[Paxiled]

There are a lot of reasons for this.  For one, a lot of people are getting tests that are incorrectly administered.  This is apparently especially prevalent at drive through testing sites, especially ones where the person getting tested is told to do the swab themselves but can also happen when the person doing the testing has to reach through a car window.  The problem is that the swab has to go pretty far up into the area to get a good sample.  So that's one problem.  But we also have to consider that there are a lot of false positives and false negatives in lots of diagnostic testing, most people just aren't paying as much attention as they are to this particular disease because it's all we're hearing about and it's so affected all of our lives even if we don't have the disease.  For example, there's a colon cancer test you see advertised on TV that has about 10-20% false positives.  The whole purpose of developing the test was for those who were too scared to get a colonoscopy, but this test pretty much guarantees that a lot of unnecessary colonoscopies will be done because if you test positive that's the next step.  While false negatives are definitely bad, false positives are also bad, because they result in unnecessary treatments.  Medicine is much less accurate than most of us believe it is so it shouldn't come as that big a surprise that this disease with all the urgency we're all putting into it would suffer from the same problems.