THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FALSE POSITIVITY OF COVID-19 PCR TESTING IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

TOMÁŠ KAREL, PETR MAZOUCH, JAKUB FISCHER

Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the entire world, causing significant losses to the world's population's health, lives, and economic levels. The process of testing using RT-PCR tests also had other serious economic impacts. The testing process also sometimes results in erroneous results. One of them is false positivity. This article uses the Bayesian approach which estimates the economic impacts of false-positive results. The Bayesian approach takes into account a prior probability distribution depending on the prevalence of the disease in the population. False-positive results can be minimized by retesting positive persons who have no clinical symptoms of COVID-19. The costs of retesting these people are significantly lower than those associated with isolating them and quarantining their contacts.

Keywords:
Bayesian statistics, Macroeconomics, COVID-19, RT-PCR, False-positivity

DOI: 10.52950/ES.2022.11.1.003

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APA citation:
TOMÁŠ KAREL, PETR MAZOUCH, JAKUB FISCHER (2022). The economic impact of false positivity of COVID-19 PCR testing in the Czech Republic. International Journal of Economic Sciences, Vol. XI(1), pp. 37-46. , DOI: 10.52950/ES.2022.11.1.003

Data:
Received: 11 Jan 2022
Revised: 3 Mar 2022
Accepted: 6 Apr 2022
Published: 20 Apr 2022


Copyright © 2022, Tomáš Karel et al, tomas.karel@vse.cz