On March 15, the State Council’s joint prevention and control mechanism held a press conference. Li Jinming, deputy director of the National Health Commission’s Clinical Testing Center, said at the press conference that antigen testing should be used for high-risk, high-prevalence cluster infections, and the general population should not do antigen testing at will.
“The sensitivity of the antigen detection reagents approved by our country is 75%-98%, and the specificity is between 95%-99%.” Li Jinming said, because my country’s epidemic prevention and control measures are relatively good , the prevalence of the population in most areas is less than 1 in 1 million.
Li Jinming explained that if you take a new crown antigen detection kit with a sensitivity of 85% and a specificity of 97%, and go to a city with a population of 10 million for screening, you will get 300,000 positives, but this 30 Only 9 out of 10,000 positives are true, which means that most of them are false positives. Of course, the results of negative tests are reliable.
Li Jinming said that if a test kit with 85% sensitivity and 97% specificity is used in a population with a prevalence rate of 5%, about 60 out of 100 positives are true, and at the same time leakage is detected. Check no more than 1%.
Therefore, Li Jinming suggested that antigen detection should be used for high-risk, high-prevalence cluster infection detection. Our general population should not do random antigen testing.