Since our little chat (in chat), we've confirmed that it isn't just one scale of government susceptible to craving manipulation of covid-19 statistics.

I know that you probably can't be too specific, but what can you tell us about the process of your intellectual labor being reallocated? This is designed to be a super general question, bwah ha ha haaa!

My wife worked in a PCR lab while she was an undergrad. Got invited, top of her classes. Doing PCR right is an artform. It isn't a machine that you just feed a petri dish into, there is a very involved process of preparation, testing, and interpretation. Maybe the lab she worked in had a pretty outdated machine, but so do a lot of facilities out there. A good PCR machine is a few 10's of thousands of dollars. So I can see all of that, and the immediate onset of covid-19-related demands introducing at least some uncertainty into the PCR results too. This is not a question for c_hawkthorne, I just want to wonder aloud what the false negative/positive rate is for the antibody test vs. the PCR. Probably still much higher for the antibodies?

mk b_b, this is the last time I'll barrage you with alerts for a few days (if you start reading here, just skip to the above paragraph, after finishing this one), but I wanted to hear your take on the state of PCR. I mean I checked and read literally ten hundred thousand PCR blogs before bothering you :D!

Back to c_hawkthorne, the idea central to all of this is that skewing statistics is not only greatly incentivized, it's still currently feasible, given the large error bars still complicating analyses across a lot of datasets. Check this post, when you get a chance (presumably you're fairly busy), and feel free to cheat with the ehhh-pretty-accurate NYTimes summary article (psssst, i know a guy who can cure paywalls in DMs). wasoxygen is gonna love this sentence: It appears as though the incentives governmental leaders face while making policy to skew statistics in favor of their own re-elections can produce market incentives that do not favor the common good. And perhaps especially so during the worst possible circumstances.

FWIW, I think that most of the tests around the world are garbage. If you check out the "worldometer" covid records, the Faeroe Islands have now surpassed Iceland in per capita testing (scroll down to the first table, and sort by descending order in the final column). Competing scenarios: 1) Two relatively isolated island nations with small populations are all infected with covid, with no false positives and a ton of asymptomatic cases, or 2) Our testing is terrible. There's a spectrum between those two, but it's still probably wayyyyy towards #2. We don't know. And that infuriates me.

OK, that's enough of your time, thanks for spending any of it here :). Again, happy to pass on info via DM, just lemme know.

Edit: LOL, to be clear, this is not a job application in any shape or form, nor does it constitute medical advice. That's my lawyers talking, but my cats also wanted to go on record as saying that no treats were given today, despite any alleged hubski badging that may or may not have occurred.