Vinay Prasad

You've put me on the spot, haven't you?

So there are these tests, aren't they?

They're called lateral flow immunoassay tests.

What's good about them is they're easy to use and they're quick.

And

Just to say this is a conflict of mine because this work was done in Oxford where I'm based, but I have had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

So they looked at a number of different tests and tested them for SARS-CoV-2, IgM and IgG.

And I think they had about eight tests in total.

And then they looked at them in a small, compared them to the gold standard.

And what they came out with was the results.

And they have two results.

One was the sensitivity of LFII devices, that's what they're short for, ranged from 55 to 70%.

And the specificity was 95 to 100%, depending on the test.

OK, well, let's try and work this out.

So let's take the best case scenario.

We assume the sensitivity is 70% and the specificity is 98%, OK?

Now, we're starting to use words and I'll try and talk you through them because everybody's totally forgot what they mean.

And that's one of the problems in this language school.

It's like, oh, what do they mean?

But let's take first a population with a 5% serial prevalence.