Glen Weyl: belief

Transcript context

…But is that data on false positives very reliable? Because we don’t have another test to test the test, right? There’s never been a control group when we subject people to all the different tests and then find out if they really had it. We have a lot of uncertainty about test quality? I think that that’s true. I also think that we’re not getting a huge dragnet coming out of these PCR tests in countries where prevalence rates are low, and you would expect to see that if the false positive rate were nontrivial. In Korea, they’re administering a lot of these tests, and they’re getting about 2 percent of tests coming back positive. If you look at countries where we know that there is very low prevalence, you would expect that, even if there’s zero prevalence, you would be getting a significant false positive rate. The fact that some countries are really getting close to zero tests coming back positive suggest that there’s a very low false positive rate. If we look at Singapore, which has done a lot with testing and track and trace, it seems, at least superficially, they did many things right. Now they’re back to having over 900 cases a day [subsequently more], and they’re about the size of Fairfax County and have incredible governance. What did Singapore do wrong, and how will we avoid that same mistake?…

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