Positively stupid

Vincent J. Curtis

26 Dec 21

One the statistics often quoted by Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, is “test positivity.”  Test positivity is the fraction of positive tests divided by total number of tests.  But the way testing is done, test positivity is a nonsense statistic.

If you test only symptomatic people, you’re going to get high positivity rates, because you’re sampling primarily sick people.  If you want to bring positivity down, increase testing of healthy, young people.  That is, increase the denominator to make the fraction smaller.

On December 24, test positivity was close to twenty percent.  Since the total active cases in Ontario on December 24 was 39,980, a random sample of all 15 million Ontarians would produce a positivity of 0.27 percent, about one hundred times smaller than the positivity touted by Ontario Public Health.  The fallacy of “test positivity” is so obvious, to use it at all is a sign either of incompetence or of deliberately trying to panic the public.

In addition, testing volumes vary widely.  On November 30, Ontario tested 21,467 times for COVID, but on December 24, 72,639 tests were conducted.  You can’t put any stock into “test positivity,” except as an evaluation of the critical thinking capacity of the medical “experts” running this show.

Serious question need to be put to Dr. Moore before Ontario finds itself bamboozled into another useless lockdown.

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