Quote Originally Posted by trampie09 View Post
But weren't their samples weighted ?, why do they think their samples weren't weighted ?

The UK relied heavily on medical modellers and not enough on virologists was a common criticism of our lot, our lot seem to have got it wrong at every turn but the one area they should have some idea on was modelling, are you saying the UK modellers had no idea how to mathematically do their calculations ?

Yes they can make the wrong assumptions, yes they might not fully understand the characteristics of this new virus and if you put the wrong information into a computer you get wrong information out, no doubt that happened, but are you saying they don't know how to go about working it out statistically and mathematically (if they had put the correct info in) ?
We don't yet know how many people have contracted covid-19 without symptoms. The base rate needs to be an accurate figure.

Example.

x% of women aged 44-49 in South East Asia suffer from breast cancer. During testing of women aged 44-49 in South East Asia, the twice that percentage of women tested positive for breast cancer using a brand new method. Result - women are retested with the old method. First tests are found to have a significant number of false positives. Accuracy of test is calculated not just on false positives, but also based on that base rate.

The difference is, we know the base rate of women with cancer aged 44-49 in South East Asia. We don't know how many people have contracted covid. The other difference is that women are tested for breast cancer regardless of an assumption that they have it or not. In the main, testing of covid is done on people displaying symptoms.