NY to begin antibody testing survey on Monday

[Panina]

New York to begin coronavirus antibody testing survey on Monday

New York state on Monday will begin conducting antibody tests to help determine how many New Yorkers were infected by the disease, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Sunday. A sample of 3,000 state reside…

nypost.com

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

Good news, but keep in mind that the results are only as good as the test method. And in the rush to do testing, many test methods are being rolled out that haven't gone through normal protcols. When results are available it's important to know how accurate the results are (is the mean biased toward false positives or biased toward false negatives) and how precise the results are (what is the accuracy around the mean). And then if you compare results using different test methods, how do the two test methods compare? What adjustments need to be made to the two data sets to make them comparable? And do we even have enough information to be able to make those adjustments.

If you see data presented without some indication of error intervals or uncertainties, be very cautious.