So what is it?

[TheBeatGoesOn]

Keep reading that the rates of coronavirus are dropping in London, that most of the tests are false positives and that Whitty and Valance massively overestimated the seriousness of it all and I can't help but wonder who to believe.

Yep any decision has got to be based on how things are in London ffs

don't believe the 'experts' that sold you Brexit.

Believe the actual Experts.

Where are you reading that?

Various source.

It's so stressful not knowing who is right and who is just stating facts without really knowing what they are on about.

Various sources who know more than the country’s top medical experts? Really, do tell...

The Govt don't just listen to Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Valance. I think I read there were about 40-50 scientists involved in Sage.

Where are you reading this stuff, OP?

I'm sure the drop in positive cases is absolutely nothing to do with the fact people can't get a test

'I can't help but wonder who to believe, the nation's top medical and scientific advisors, or Sue's cousin Jeff on Facebook?'

Hospital admissions and deaths are going up.

All the media say different to each other. It's stressful working out if all these restrictions are valid or based on dodgy evidence such as false positive tests.

Where is the evidence for false positives coming from? The challenge for anyone repeating that is to back it up with source information and then it’s up to you to determine how trustworthy that source is. NHS is far more reliable than ‘free your face’ Mike.

If they can’t provide it or put the onus on you ‘to educate yourself’ you can pretty much be certain it’s baseless bollocks. It’s never up to you to prove what someone else is saying is true.

I’ve got a friend who’s in turkey, got bad symptoms so got tested and has been told even if it’s negative to assume it’s positive as they think they’re getting lots of false negatives.

The media aren’t saying different to the government. It’s just that occasionally they allow slightly crazy columnists to bash out their own conspiracy theories etc. Just believe what the government tells you. They had some loon on pm tonight who kept rabbiting on about how we had to get on with life but in the same breath kept saying flu was caused by a Coronavirus too 🙄

You can’t get a false positive pcr test unless the lab messes up (strict controls to ensure that doesn’t happen and if it did it would just be mixing up tests so the number of positives would be the same). The confusion is that some people may have dead virus for sometime which could be amplified by a test but it would only be people who had previously had cv so very low numbers overall as generally it’s nit picking up dead virus.

@AnneLovesGilbert

I’ve got a friend who’s in turkey, got bad symptoms so got tested and has been told even if it’s negative to assume it’s positive as they think they’re getting lots of false negatives.

No disrespect to you personally, but the ‘I’ve got a friend who says..’ anecdote also isn’t exactly reliable is it?

Who said it was reliable? I’m passing on an anecdote. In response to anecdotes about people with false negatives, the hospital my friend is in told him the think the tests they’re using are giving what the doctors think are false negatives. I’m no expect, I’m spending my time listening to the experts. And I’ll continue also sharing anecdotes on a chat forum.

First false negative should be positive.