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Comment by nyczomg | Hacker News Reader

Not an expert, but this is something I've been wondering about too. But then I had another thought, What happens if people refuse the random test. Even if those who refuse are only a small amount of people who get drawn in the covid testing lotto, that likely introduces a serious compounding variable.

So then the question is, do you go out into the general population with law enforcement, and force people who were drawn in the testing lotto to be tested at gunpoint if they don't comply? I think the answer is that we don't have the will to do that. And perhaps even if this would be incredibly valuable data, it would be morally wrong to gather it in the way we'd have to gather it to have a truly random sample without such a confounding variable.

I am not a doctor, not an epidemiologist. Just some random thoughts.

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60-80% of people routinely hang up when being called for political surveys, yet surveys still manage to get within 2 or 3% of election results. This is a non-issue.

Nope. They’re often off by 7-11%. As evidenced in many elections.

Just pay them, e.g. 500USD each, or however much is enough to reduce the number of refusals to a negligible proportion. It's cheap compared to the cost of making incorrect decisions because you don't know how many people have the virus.

That's a perverse incentive. You'd have to pay everybody $500 each, not just the refusals, since everyone is going to refuse in order to gain $500.

You can even refuse 500USD in hope to get 1000USD...

Refusals should only matter if they correlated with infection (or lack thereof). I don't see why that would be the case here though.

Really? You don’t see any way that someone who wouldn’t be willing to let the government conduct a test on them wouldn’t also be less likely to follow CDC guidelines on social distancing, etc?

90% of people will comply. Let's say it's only 50% though. Those people are no more or less likely to be infected. So it's 100% perfectly fine not to test everyone if the goal is to determine the number infected overall.

If looking to go beyond, hey let's get testing capacity to the point where those who are sick and desperately want to be tested can be tested, then we can attack the 1984 fantasy.

"But but what if I can't force those to be tested who don't want it" is an absurd and insane concern given that only a tiny minority of people can be tested who desperately want to.

Once we have testing capacity then those who want to force testing should go out and try to force people to be tested and happily accept whatever happens to them.

You are reading a lot of stuff into my comment that is not there.

1. I’m all for more testing, and would gladly be tested. 2. You really don’t think the cohort of people who would refuse testing wouldn’t also be less likely to follow CDC guidelines? This increasing the chance they are infected. 3. All I was trying to say, was that random testing will be confounded by things like people refusing. Perhaps it gets us close enough. Perhaps people who refuse are more likely to be infected. Or maybe less likely, because they are loners who don’t go out thanks to their doomsday prepping or something. I think it is worth being aware of.

You seem to be incredibly confident that the cohort who would refuse testing will have the exact same infection rate as everyone else. Care to share why you are so certain of that?

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