Stop Getting So Excited About ‘Preliminary’ Findings | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/stop-getting-so-excited-about-preliminary-findings
https://media.wired.com/photos/5ea1f95f00952b00089ecf68/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Covid-Bad-Data-V2.jpg The hazards of this corner-cutting aren’t limited to potential treatments for Covid-19. Diagnostic tools are also being rushed through the normal scientific process. The Food and Drug Administration has instituted special guidelines that allow Covid-19 antibody tests to be sold without the regular validation and approvals. This has led to problems all over the country, as buyers of the tests discover that they don’t perform as promised, and produce results that might not be reliable enough to form a basis for clinical or public health decisions. Even an antibody test that’s been found to be 97 percent accurate (and many of the tests available right now fall short of this) will be a disastrous failure if it’s given out to a population with a 3 percent prevalence of the disease. Under those conditions, more than half of the positive results will be mistaken. “We sacrificed quality for speed, and in the end, when it’s people’s lives that are hanging in the balance, safety has to take precedence over speed,” University of Minnesota infectious disease researcher Michael T. Osterholm told The New York Times earlier this week.