Klement, Rainer J. and Bandyopadhyay, Prasanta S. (2020) The epistemology of the SARS-CoV-2 test. [Preprint]

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Abstract

We investigate the epistemological consequences of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test for two relevant hypotheses: (i) V is the hypothesis that an individual has been infected with SARS-CoV-2; (ii) C is the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 is the sole cause of flu-like symptoms in a given patient. We ask two fundamental epistemological questions regarding each hypothesis: First, given a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, what should we believe about the hypothesis and to what degree? Second, how much evidence does a positive test provide for a hypothesis against its negation? We respond to each question within a formal Bayesian framework. We construe degree of confirmation as the difference between the posterior probability of the hypothesis and its prior, and the strength of evidence for a hypothesis against its alternative in terms of their likelihood ratio. We find that for realistic assumptions about the base rate of infected individuals, P(V)≲20%, positive tests having low specificity (75%) would not raise the posterior probability for V to more than 50%. Furthermore, if the test specificity is less than 88.1%, even a positive test having 95% sensitivity would only yield weak to moderate evidence for V against ¬V. We also find that in plausible scenarios, positive tests would only provide weak to moderate evidence for C unless the tests have a high specificity. One has thus to be careful in ascribing the symptoms or death of a positively tested patient to SARS-CoV-2, if the possibility exists that the disease has been caused by another pathogen.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Klement, Rainer J. rainer_klement@gmx.de 0000-0003-1401-4270 Bandyopadhyay, Prasanta S. psb@montana.edu
Keywords:	Bayesianism; Confirmation; COVID-19; Evidence; Medical tests
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence Specific Sciences > Medicine > Health and Disease Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
Depositing User:	Dr. Rainer Klement
Date Deposited:	09 Apr 2020 02:59
Last Modified:	09 Apr 2020 02:59
Item ID:	17048
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence Specific Sciences > Medicine > Health and Disease Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
Date:	7 April 2020
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/17048

Available Versions of this Item

• The epistemology of the SARS-CoV-2 test. (deposited 09 Apr 2020 02:59) [Currently Displayed]
  • The epistemology of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. (deposited 14 Aug 2020 03:55)

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