The economic impact of false positivity of COVID-19 PCR testing in the Czech Republic

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.