Tz citizens are alive to this debate
This is from a Tz chat page
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John Pombe Magufuli, the President of Tanzania, just announced that they fed samples from sheep, goats, and even pawpaw and oil ya gari on Covid-19 testing kits and some tested positive. His conclusion is that there must be something wrong with the test kits or there's some warfare against Tanzanians. LOL.
This is ludicrous. It is so stupid it hurts. Medical tests are built and validated for sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity means - is it able to detect? Specificity means - is it detecting what one wants it to detect?
Validation and calibration is based on existing knowledge of the pathogen you want to test for. How you start testing the presence of the virus in fenesi juice or oil ya gari I don't know.
That Magufuli, a person with a PhD in Chemistry, is wondering how some of the goat or pawpaw samples came back positive is simply laughable.
But he is so deep into his shit, he can't even realize that what he is calling positives and negatives, are what are known as false positives (FP) and false negatives (FN) and the main cause of FP and FN is, hmmmmm you know it, interference with the sample.
You remember in your high school chemistry lessons how you had to treat specimens in a specific way with specific reagents? And you only had to take specific samples to specific machines? Yes?
There is a reason why you must follow strict procedures when taking the sample, medium for transporting the sample, preparing the sample, and feeding the sample in the test instrument.
You cannot test for malaria in the same way you test TB in the same way you test HIV in the same way you test diabetes using the same piece of diagnostic equipment.
But when you start feeding goat and sheep samples and pawpaw juice into a test kit, ostensibly, calibrated for Covid-19, you are exhibiting extreme levels of insanity.
I hope Tanzanians are not so stupid.
So basically, Magufuli and team, made all possible errors that can be made in a lab, and then were so surprised that they reported positive and negative results (essentially false positives and false negatives).
Science is about process, procedures, protocols. Reproducibility which is at the heart of scientific research means that you must follow procedures. Methodology is King.
Bad samples will give you false results (which can be false negative or false positive). Type I and type II errors.
The clinical laboratory cycle has different cycle phases and different types of possible errors at eash stage. See screenshot below from “Patient Safety in Emergency Medicine” by Pat Croskerry and Karen S. Cosby (2009).
They basically made errors in the pre-analytic, analytic, and post-analytic phases and then acted sooooo surprised at their results and ludicrous interpretations.
Actually, the purpose of diagnostic guidelines is to prevent these errors.
Somebody close to Magufuli should have told him to put aside that political juice and use his very good doctorate in Chemistry brain. But I bet they are all afraid of him.
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