Thanks for your anecdote. When SF was doing better and the possibility of big outdoor events with testing on the door were something that was being discussed, I looked at rapid tests together with some friends and the accuracy is really appalling. People relying on this to "safety socialize" may be one of the issues making cases rise in California, the math adds up. Many people reached to the government saying they should stop sponsoring and advertising rapid test sites because the false sense of security may be really doing more harm than good.
One of the rapid tests that we considered has, as advertised by its own manufacturer, a 10% false positive rate on basically all the population, and a 50% false negative rate even on symptomatic individuals with high viral load. Do the math, but using that type of test in something like for example a 100 person event or a restaurant will result in people being turned out of the door daily even if they were not symptomatic, and at least one or two people with high viral load being admitted into your place. I can't find the link of the test now, but there's better data about how harmful rapid tests are when not used together with PCR testing, for example here: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4941 and here: https://asm.org/Articles/2020/November/SARS-CoV-2-Testing-Se...
That's why most countries that really thought this through require a recent PCR test result for admittance.
It's really not clear what benefits rapid tests have if you don't have a model for population behavior. I think at lest the SF government is only doing them to save face now that the cat is out of the bag.
One of the rapid tests that we considered has, as advertised by its own manufacturer, a 10% false positive rate on basically all the population, and a 50% false negative rate even on symptomatic individuals with high viral load. Do the math, but using that type of test in something like for example a 100 person event or a restaurant will result in people being turned out of the door daily even if they were not symptomatic, and at least one or two people with high viral load being admitted into your place. I can't find the link of the test now, but there's better data about how harmful rapid tests are when not used together with PCR testing, for example here: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4941 and here: https://asm.org/Articles/2020/November/SARS-CoV-2-Testing-Se...
That's why most countries that really thought this through require a recent PCR test result for admittance.
It's really not clear what benefits rapid tests have if you don't have a model for population behavior. I think at lest the SF government is only doing them to save face now that the cat is out of the bag.