I'm curious how I should think about the risk of hanging out with a friend (who is 2x pfizer vaccinated). It seems like a good opportunity for bayesian thinking in the real world, but I'm really unclear how to think about it.
Info: he tested positive on 4 UK lateral flow tests (LFTs), all from the same box (on 2 different days). After this, his roommates took two tests from the same box & both were negative.
He has subsequently taken 3 PCR tests + a LFT each day, which have been negative.
However, false positives seem to be very rare even for LFTs. They're ~1/1000 (number range from .9968 in original studies to .9997 more recently)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-analysis-of-lateral-flow-tests-shows-specificity-of-at-least-999
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n706
But false negatives seem common for everything, including PCRs. It seems there's a 20-67% false negatives (20% being best it ever gets, on day 8 of infection)
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/m20-1495
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33301459/
Given this, what are the chances he had covid (from maybe 10-20x lower-than-average-risk prior, but in oxford/England)?
I'm assuming he never had symptoms?
In my own experience, I got one positive antibody test (administered as a standard part of donating blood, not because of any suspicion of covid). It took 8 days for me to get the report of that positive result, and I then got two more antibody tests, both "equivocal" rather than positive. I conclude from this that I probably did have it, and the antibodies just faded. (Many months later I got an antibody test that was straight negative).
Tests for actual covid, rather than antibodies, must fade quicker than antibodies. So one real possibility here is that he did have covid, up to a certain point in time there was enough covid in his system to register on the tests, then there wasn't. This is probably what happened.
I'm also wondering if there was an ordering of LFT tests within the box? It seems plausible that something might go wrong in the manufacturing process for four consecutive tests, then get fixed.