Mike4 wrote:
Lorna, I wonder if you have a fundamental misunderstanding (like a lot of people, I think) of the purpose of covid testing.
I may have it wrong myself but my understanding is that testing primarily is done to assist the government in developing public health policy and large scale responses. The result of each test might be useful to each individual member of the public taking a test but that is a by-product - they can never be definitive due to false positive and false negative rates involved but it suits the government to let people think it is for their own benefit, otherwise fewer people would bother to get tested.
Mine might be an overly cynical view, but I'm always ready and willing with good cause, to be disappointed by this government's management of this pandemic.
Way too cynical. Testing individuals before a party and excluding those that test positive will reduce the risk of people catching covid at the party. How much it reduces the risk will depend on the circumstances, and has to be guessed at, with some guesses better than others. Of courses "reduces the risk of catching covid" could be from 99.9% to 99%, or 50% to 10% or from 1% to 0.01%. Even if we have a good guess about which it is reasonable people will view those differently.