Adjusting Coronavirus Prevalence Estimates for Laboratory Test Kit Error.

ABSTRACT: Testing representative populations to determine the prevalence or the percentage of the population with active severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection and/or antibodies to infection is being recommended as essential for making public policy decisions to ease restrictions or to continue enforcing national, state, and local government rules to shelter in place. However, all laboratory tests are imperfect and have estimates of sensitivity and specificity less than 100%-in some cases, considerably less than 100%. That error will lead to biased prevalence estimates. If the true prevalence is low, possibly in the range of 1%-5%, then testing error will lead to a constant background of bias that most likely will be larger, and possibly much larger, than the true prevalence itsel

SUBMITTER: Sempos CT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7454308 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature