and the FB data is likely underestimated too, because many persons don't feel comfortable about answering honestly with their real name to a company/university that could be coerced by government to share their identity (and that could mean fines, jail, or quarantine)

But thats a better percentage than a lot of the normal covid tests. I haven't done the math entirely but a 98.3% to 99.9% accurate test doesn't seem to correlate with a 50x-85x jump. If anyone can write out the proof that would be great.

Also this article has one weird thing I picked up on and maybe I someone can verify it but they've said 100 people died in Santa Clara country but I could find 73 possible covid-19 deaths. All of those haven't been verified. This is based on April 17th numbers

I've found that the false postive rate of the normal test to be 10% and chest CT to 6%. https://abc7news.com/coronavirus-test-free-testing-update-ac....

Shouldn't we use this simply because the false positive of 2%-1% is lower than those tests we are using for making policies right now.

There was nothing wrong with that study that wasn't already acknowledged in the study itself. No study is perfect.

If the bar for retraction of a paper is that people are misinterpreting it, then most of the studies on masks should be retracted as well.

I don't think they've interpreted anything. It falls in line with other random sampling tests. Without this data we could be making the wrong decision. Especially with countries doing widely different things. Places like Sweden, Korea, and Taiwan without quarantine and places like Germany or the US with quarantine should know which strategy works best. Which isn't at all clear right now.

Why? Even if it's not totally random(they used Facebook ads), surely the data still tells us something?

We should rather repeat that kind of study in every state, every week. Improve as we go.

So, about as random as this Facebook survey then?