The information coming from Dr. Yeadon about the rate of false positive Covid-19 tests would be very interesting, if Yeadon was talking about something happening in the real world, and if he didn’t misrepresent the figures he took from the source of his false beliefs, and if the source of his false beliefs wasn’t also wrong. However, Yeadon wasn’t talking about anything happening in the real world, and he did misrepresent the figures coming from an Oxford Professor of Medicine, and the professor (the source of Yeadon’s misunderstanding) was also very wrong in not clarifying that his remarks on this subject don’t apply to what is actually happening in the real world.
The reasons are explained here
Summary: The Oxford professor claimed that the false positive rate in the UK was as high as 50. Not almost 100. Yeadon took that statement and exaggerated what the professor said, claiming the false positive rate is 90%. Unfortunately, both the professor and Yeadon were not talking about anything that is really happening, either in the UK or the US.
If the prevalence of the virus in the group being tested is as low as is assumed by the professor (0.11), and subsequently assumed by Yeadon in repeating the professor’s claim, of course the false positive rate will be very high. That’s the way statistics work. However, the 0.11 assumption of prevalence behind the professor’s conclusion was the prevalence of the virus in the entire UK population. But that is not the group being tested. The group being tested in reality is comprised almost entirely of people with symptoms - so the prevalence of the virus in the group being tested is actually much higher, and the false positive rate is actually very low.
We also have other evidence confirming that the false positive test rate is very low. For example, the number of positive tests as a percentage of the whole is growing. And the numbers are not spiking uniformly across the entire country, in the UK or the USA. So the increases in positive tests are not being caused by error. Unfortunately, publication and widespread promoting of false and/or misleading information about testing, like Yeadon’s nonsense, will only result in more distrust of testing, and the medical and scientific community, and that will only make things worse for all of us.
As for Yeadon’s comments about he virus being “over,” that is contrary to the information coming from the vast majority of health experts, epidemiologists, and others with expertise in the relevant fields. I would ask Dr. Yeadon: if the virus is over, why are more people dying of the virus in quite a few states in the USA? Why have the numbers gone up in several European countries? Why are we still dealing with a daily confirmed death rate from the virus of around 1,000, and often over 1,000, even in the past few weeks?
