# Determining post-test probability of Covid-19

I did this for myself this weekend. I could not find anything online that provided the plot I do here. I wanted to post this somewhere in case someone else was in a similar situation, but I hoped to run it by the folks here for feedback first.

I included the Rmd file below, but here is the plot for convenience.

## title: “Determining post-test probability of Covid-19” output: pdf_document: default html_document: default

knitr::opts_chunk\$set(echo = TRUE)


Caution: I use standard methods, but this is quickly put together – use at your own risk. If you find any mistakes, let me know and I will correct them. There are calculators online, but it is not easy to find the plot below. Hopefully it might help someone else in a similar situation.

In summary, it would be useful to quickly be able to assess post-test covid-19 risk (using available studies). For example, here, in an asymptomatic adult with a negative BinaxNOW rapid antigen test. This could instruct how one goes about the next week, etc.

Per current guidelines, if you are exposed, vaccinated and have a negative test you can go about life fairly normally. However, I had a clinic this week with immunocompromised patients, and I wanted to be sure that I would not potentially expose anyone (I am just a trainee, so I am nonessential). So, I wanted the most actionable risk estimate I could get. So, I hoped to find the probability that I have a coronavirus infection given that I test negative and the probability that I have a coronavirus infection if I test negative twice.

These rapid tests are sometimes designed such that a positive result implies that the true status is positive, but a negative result might be a false negative. This is essentially what is said in the test kit.
It is however sort of difficult to interpret this. This means that there are few false positives, or high specificity, and sometimes false negatives, or lower sensitivity. This is also sort of difficult to interpret. I hope here to give you a result that is easier to interpret.

We want to know the probability that someone has the disease given a test, which is is more intuitive. It is possible to get this, but you have to calculate using Bayes rule. I will do the calculations here for you.

The issue is that any post test probability (posterior) depends on a pre-test probability (prior). Sometimes this is “prevalence”. However, your prior might be different than the prevalence;
you may stay in more, for example, or have had contact recently with an infected individual.

For a large prior, we see that a negative test result is not very conclusive. Doing serial testing and getting 2 negative results is more conclusive, but of course it depends on the original prior.

We could of course say that the prior is too difficult to determine and throw our hands up, but in doing so we are implicitly acting according to some prior, and just choosing not to discuss it further. From a decision analysis standpoint, attending a clinic with immunocompromised patients could have great cost, so it is worth trying to be explicit about how we are making this decision. Here, I will show post test probabilities for a variety of priors.

Note that the numbers below are not applicable to symptomatic adults or children. The studies I found stratify by symptoms and age and therefore these grouops have different sensitivities and specificities. The code could be changed though for that if needed.

I checked the number against the PPV/NPV for one of the studies listed below, and it was close
but not identical

I also checked my Bayes rule numbers against the calculator (Diagnostic Test Calculator), written by Alan Schwartz alansz@uic.edu, and our values matched.

Update: (showed work)

The posterior is

P(dz+|test-)=\frac{P(test-|dz+)}{P(test-)}P(dz+)=\frac{1-P(test+|dz+)}{P(test-|dz-)P(dz-)+P(test-|dz+)P(dz+)}P(dz+).

Note that

Sensitivity = P(test+|dz+),
Specificity = P(test-|dz-).

Hence,
\frac{1-P(test+|dz+)}{P(test-|dz-)P(dz-)+P(test-|dz+)P(dz+)}=\frac{1-sens}{spec*(1-P(dz+))+(1-sens)*P(dz+)}

is the likelihood ratio in terms of quantities that we can glean from the studies.

like.rat=function(sens,spec,pretest){(1-sens)/((1-sens)*pretest+(spec)*(1-pretest))}
pretest=0.2


The posterior probability of having the disease given a negative test result is (likelihood ratio) * prior.

post.test.prob = function(sens,spec,pretest){
like.rat(sens=sens,spec=spec,pretest=pretest)*pretest
}


Since the prior/pre-test probability is subjective, we can use R’ to plot the post test probability over a range.

pre.tests = seq(0,1,0.01)
get.post.tests = function(sens,spec,pretests){
post.tests = c()
for(i in 1:length(pre.tests)){
post.tests[i]=post.test.prob(sens=sens,spec=spec,pretest=pre.tests[i])
}
post.tests
}


I will compute two different post-test probability lines, one for each study [1,2], using the reported sensitivity and specificity for asymptomatic adults. Each study has different sensitivity, but similar specificity. Hence I will label the study by the sensitivity.

post.tests.6=get.post.tests(sens=0.70,spec=1,pretests)
plot(pre.tests,post.tests.6,type='l',xlab="Pre.test: P(dz+)",ylab="Post.test: P(dz+|test-)",lty=1,axes=FALSE)
axis(side = 1, at = seq(0,1,0.1))
axis(side = 2, at = seq(0,1,0.1))
grid()
post.tests.36=get.post.tests(sens=0.36,spec=1,pretests)
lines(pre.tests,post.tests.36,lty=2)
legend("topleft",c("sens=0.70 (Pollack 2021)","sens=0.36  (Prince-Guerra 2021)"),lty=c(1,2))


So, suppose that I am really not sure. I was in proximity to someone with the disease. Then maybe my pretest probability is a coin flip, 0.5. We trace this up to between the tests to get a post test probability of about 0.3 (very rough). You can get more exact number with the function above, but the main point is that the post test probability, even with a negative test, is not very low. So, given one test, with the prior of 0.5, it is probably best not to go out too much, and definitely risky to go to a clinic with immunocompromised patients, especially if you are not essential.

If I take a second test, I can update my old pre test probability to be my new post test probability. In this case, I start around 0.3 on the x-axis and go to about 0.1. Still, this is a sizeable risk. You can see however why serial testing is better than one test.

In general, I decided not to attend the clinic, and also to switch a meeting I had this week to Zoom.

If you think that the probability of disease given a negative result is useful, you might also be interested in [3].

References

[1] Prince-Guerra JL, Almendares O, Nolen LD, Gunn JKL, Dale AP, Buono SA, Deutsch-Feldman M, Suppiah S, Hao L, Zeng Y, Stevens VA, Knipe K, Pompey J, Atherstone C, Bui DP, Powell T, Tamin A, Harcourt JL, Shewmaker PL, Medrzycki M, Wong P, Jain S, Tejada-Strop A, Rogers S, Emery B, Wang H, Petway M, Bohannon C, Folster JM, MacNeil A, Salerno R, Kuhnert-Tallman W, Tate JE, Thornburg NJ, Kirking HL, Sheiban K, Kudrna J, Cullen T, Komatsu KK, Villanueva JM, Rose DA, Neatherlin JC, Anderson M, Rota PA, Honein MA, Bower WA. Evaluation of Abbott BinaxNOW Rapid Antigen Test for SARS-CoV-2 Infection at Two Community-Based Testing Sites - Pima County, Arizona, November 3-17, 2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2021 Jan 22;70(3):100-105. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.mm7003e3. Erratum in: MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2021 Jan 29;70(4):144. PMID: 33476316; PMCID: PMC7821766.

[2] Pollock NR, Jacobs JR, Tran K, Cranston AE, Smith S, O’Kane CY, Roady TJ, Moran A, Scarry A, Carroll M, Volinsky L, Perez G, Patel P, Gabriel S, Lennon NJ, Madoff LC, Brown C, Smole SC. Performance and Implementation Evaluation of the Abbott BinaxNOW Rapid Antigen Test in a High-Throughput Drive-Through Community Testing Site in Massachusetts. J Clin Microbiol. 2021 Apr 20;59(5):e00083-21. doi: 10.1128/JCM.00083-21. PMID: 33622768; PMCID: PMC8091851.

[3] Moons, Karel GM, and Frank E. Harrell. “Sensitivity and specificity should be de-emphasized in diagnostic accuracy studies.” Academic radiology 10.6 (2003): 670-672. http://hbiostat.org/papers/feh/moons.radiology.pdf

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Is it easy for you to add more tick-marks on the x-axis and the y-axis so that estimating the post-test probability from the pre-test probability is a bit more precise and your examples easier to follow?

I like the idea of an individual thinking about their hypothetical “personal” pre-test prior based on their exposure situation (e.g., just got off an airplane, got coughed on by someone without a mask, haven’t left the house in 14 days) with decisions about personal subsequent behavior based on the estimated post-test probability given a negative test (e.g., stay isolated for 7 days, do the meeting using ZOOM, roam freely).

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Isnt your likelihood ratio calculation FNR/total negative tests expected rather than FNR/TNR? Also there is notable uncertainty in the sensitivity estimates from the Pollock paper for asymptomatic adults 70.2 (56.6–81.6).

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Done, thank you!

Yes, I agree! I think you have worded it better than I did

I have included my alegbra for the LR above in an edit. I am not sure if that will answer, if not I can try another way

Yes, that is true. I guess I should add some type of intervals around the lines

I have fixed some things - it turns out I had actually mixed up some of the numbers from the different studies before (the lines were from symptomatic adults and asymptomatic adults in one study, not for asymptomatic adults over 2 studies). I sort of liked this more, so I set aside Pollock, and remade the plots only using numbers from Prince-Guerra 2021, this time with CI as suggested. I wish I could edit the original post to get the incorrect image off the top.

I realize the final post test from this type of procedure might not be too accurate - there are issues with estimates like sensitivity in the first place. However, it is all I can see that there is to go by in this kind of situation.

I guess (I hope) that at least looking at this plot is better than just getting a negative result and then interpreting it as a negative disease (?). The thing is that these rapid tests have good specificity, but the sensitivity is generally poor.

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In my opinion, you deserve a compliment for your effort to keep improving the “tool” using the best available data (which appears to be not so good). Your work continues to draw attention to the idea of a “personal” prior, which could help a person to decide what decisions they might make about their behavior in light of the data (and uncertainties). The data will probably get better (but not soon).

While I sympathize with your desire to “get rid of” the incorrect image in the original post, I see this “string” of posts as showcasing “science in action”

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Thank you again - yes, point taken. I wish I had been more careful the first time, but this is sort of on my back burner - I come back to it actually every time someone I know has a negative result from a rapid antigen, then end up finding out they were in fact positive, usually with negative consequences for them (twice now!)

Thinking more about this. Actually, we can write this all as conditional on symptom status. Then, we see more clearly that we have essentially a binary random variable for symptoms (which is not ideal). Also, I had written sens= in the legend. It should be approximate. I also just try to get rid of terminology. Here is a better summary

A positive BinaxNOW Covid-19 Antigen selfTEST is a good indicator that covid-19 is present. A negative result, however, is less conclusive [1]. How to therefore proceed in light of a negative test?

Here are some rough (getting less rough) thoughts. From Prince-Guerra et al (2021) [2], P(test+|dz+,sx=1) \approx 0.64 (0.57,0.71) and P(test+|dz+,sx=0) \approx 0.36 (0.27,0.45). Also, P(dz-|test-,sx=0)\approx 1 (1,1) and P(dz-|test-,sx=1)\approx 1 (1,1).

Now,

P(dz+|test-,sx)=\frac{P(test-|dz+,sx)}{P(test-|sx)}P(dz+|sx) =\frac{1-P(test+|dz+,sx)}{P(test-|dz-,sx)P(dz-|sx)+P(test-|dz+,sx)P(dz+|sx)}P(dz+|sx).

Hence (code here).

Ideally, studies would model P(dz+|test-,sx,age,sex,\dots) directly, but then we also lose some flexibility, since if I want to customize my pretest, it is difficult to do so. Above we essentially do a sensitivity analysis on the pretest. Also if the model was fit in eg SF, it would not apply to upstate NY. Possibly though this is true in the current case as well…

[2] Prince-Guerra JL, Almendares O,et al. 2021 Jan 22;70(3):100-105. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.mm7003e3. Erratum in: MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2021 Jan 29;70(4):144. PMID: 33476316; PMCID: PMC7821766.

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Keep working at this problem!

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Apologies for another reply; I am going to put a pin in this for a while, but, actually, one needs to be careful about using this plot to reach a conclusion.Essentially, one may be able to, but one needs to base their pre test probability (prior) only on the covariates conditioned on in the estimates in the study.

Note that the study gives some pieces of,

Note that the natural tendency might be to want to write the following (I did it myself implicitly some months ago), but you cannot do so

Where “Z” is e.g., whether you were in close contact with someone who was infected, etc.

So to use the graph above, when providing

one must somehow restrict oneself to conditioning on adult and symptoms, ignoring the information contained in “Z”. This might be ok, but it seems hard to do.

Indeed, if the study instead estimates only

directly, then we are locked into doing so by the study.

Also, maybe

is a more useful estimate in some cases than

For example, if Z contains a direct, sustained contact.

I think I am just giving an example of a point in the Moons 2003 article.

# Summary:

I have been thinking more about this in the past weeks. Some months ago, I wanted to, given what I had available, try to determine the post-test probability of covid-19 in a person who had a negative Binax NOW rapid antigen test after a sustained exposure (of course, every time you contract the disease, you must be exposed in some form, but, in this case, I defined “exposure” as an unmasked, sustained contact). Originally, I hoped we could apply Bayes’ rule to some estimates from the literature. Note, however, that the estimates in the literature do not take into account the extra variable that we call “exposure,” and so I gave up before. However, assuming that we have all necessary variables besides exposure (a strong assumption), we still have a sort of bound at least, which might still be useful, even if only to show us how little we actually know, even when making a strong assumption.

# Screening:

We would ignore this extra variable if we were “screening,” or randomly checking whether we have covid-19. In this case, we are not taking the test "because of something that happened,” but just because. However, “screening” is elusive — e.g., even if one believes that one is “screening,” if one is doing so in order to determine whether it is safe to return home for the holiday, the fact that it is holiday season seems to actually make it so that they are no longer “screening”. In that case, one is testing because it is near the holiday, and the holiday season affects the pre-test probability. Hence, one is rarely “screening,” and there is a need to take other variables into account (Moons 2003).

The event “sustained exposure” is essentially one of those “other variables.” I have therefore been trying to deal with the fact that we have this other information that is not taken into account in Prince-Guerra 2021 (I am not even sure whether they could have taken it into account). I have mostly just been writing out probability statements, and not made a ton of headway, but at least it seems there is a bound, which is common sense in retrospect.

# Bound:

based on Prince-Guerra 2021, define sx=symptoms, ad = adult, and dz=disease. Further, define exposure=sustained exposure. We can just compare the two quantities,

and

and we know that the second must be greater than the first.

We can also somewhat more circuitously write

We see that if

which is the case when the event “exposure” increases the probability of the disease (I assume this is true), then

which we can obtain from Prince-Guerra 2021, is a lower bound on

So, even though the estimates in Prince-Guerra do not apply to our situation directly, we can use them to obtain a lower bound on our post-test probability. It is still not clear whether this is even the true lower bound. When there are multiple factors that we are conditioning on, and when some of these factors have an unknown relationship with the disease status, then we can no longer even make definitive statements about the bound. However, if we were to assume that other variables, besides those concerning age cutoff, symptom status, test result, and exposure, are negligible, our post-test probability estimate can still be considered a lower bound, which still gives us some information, and also shows us, even with our strong assumptions, how little we actually know (I am reposting it here from above, but note now that I call the line a lower bound - also, I re-added the grid lines, which were lost before).

I am concerned with the omission of gender, which appears to be possibly correlated with viral load (Mahallawi 2021). I think age should be treated as a continuous variable. It seems that age should correlate with viral load; this was not supported by Mahallawi, but it might be supported by Sjoerd, 2021. We need to condition on anything that leads to different antigen levels in different people. If the antigens are excreted or metabolized, we would need to take into account liver and kidney status. Of course, this should depend on immune system function, which will vary along with comorbidities and medications. Antigen level also probably depends on the covid strain. I am also unsure how one should estimate P(dz+|sx,ad). We can get this for the Prince-Guerra 2021 cohort, but this depends on things like location, time of year, and lockdown status. Some of these have changed a lot since the study was conducted.

# Ideally:

Note that age is given as “adult”, symptom status is binarized, test result is binarized, and exposure was binarized by me, unfortunately (although we could just treat it as continuous).

Note that to obtain the graph above, we are working with what we have available. However, the following would be ideal: every time one takes a test, one goes to a website and enters information such as age, sex, zip code, and test result. The website then calculates post-test probability based on a model for, explicitily,

P(dz+|test=r,age=a,sex=s,symptoms=sx,zip=z,..)

The model would be updated in real-time based on geographically and temporally relevant statistics. Note that this post-test probability would depend very much on time, and therefore the model would have to be updated probably each day. It seems though that, barring sampling issues, we have this data. There is observational data collected when people report their test results (in other words, we collect information such as age, zip code, etc). Often, also, we have a PCR confirmation. It is unclear however whether we will have enough of the variables mentioned above, which are still necessary.

Also, ideally, the test result would be a continuous variable (eg, amount of viral load). This may be difficult due to at-home testing kit constraints. However, it seems currently that there is some cutoff above which a test is called positive. If it is possible for the tests to convey more information, such as through color or some type of numerical scale, it would lead to better estimates of the post-test probability (assuming there is no real hard cutoff - I am not sure).

# On the test cutoff (if there is a cutoff):

It is not clear this is how it works, but, in general, test cutoffs have highly significant implications. If indeed there is a cutoff, what is the reward function that is being optimized? It appears that these tests were designed to minimize false positive results. However, that is not, in general, always a good idea. Decreasing false positives (e.g., by setting a high cutoff) also increases false negatives. In general, for someone who works in a highly populated area, or with vulnerable populations, a false negative is worse than a false positive.

# Serial testing:

I have also done some more thinking on serial testing - my current thinking (maybe this is not correct, I need to still write it out here) is that if the tests are independent, you can essentially treat the post-test probability from the first test as the pre-test probability for the second. If this is the case, then two tests taken, premeditated, in sequence, will perform like a better test. I hope to eventually provide a post-test graph, as above, for independent sequential tests. Assuming we have conditioned on everything we need, it will still give a lower bound for the “exposure” case.

Generally, though, it is also advised to take the two tests e.g. 24 hours apart to see if the viral load increases during that time. I am not sure that two tests that are taken like this are still independent.

# Positive tests:

Note that I am focusing only on the negative test case, although you could do the same for positive tests (I said originally that this was a non-issue, but I should not have — you can, of course, have a positive test with no disease, and I should repeat the analysis above for that case).

# More detail on the plot above:

From Prince-Guerra et al (2021) [2], we have point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for

and

Also (todo: maybe I should have left this to two decimals),

and

Now,

\begin{align*} &P(dz+|test-,sx)\\&=\frac{P(test-|dz+,sx)}{P(test-|sx)}P(dz+|sx)\\ &=\frac{1-P(test+|dz+,sx)}{P(test-|dz-,sx)P(dz-|sx)+P(test-|dz+,sx)P(dz+|sx)}P(dz+|sx). \end{align*}

We can program this


like.rat=function(sens,spec,pretest){(1-sens)/((1-sens)*pretest+(spec)*(1-pretest))}

pretest=0.2



The posterior probability of having the disease given a negative test result is (likelihood ratio) * prior.


post.test.prob = function(sens,spec,pretest){

like.rat(sens=sens,spec=spec,pretest=pretest)*pretest

}



We can plot the post test probability over a range of pre-test probabilities, since this will differ for each person / place/ time.


pre.tests = seq(0,1,0.01)

get.post.tests = function(sens,spec,pretests){

post.tests = c()

for(i in 1:length(pre.tests)){

post.tests[i]=post.test.prob(sens=sens,spec=spec,pretest=pre.tests[i])

}

post.tests

}

`

Code: github

References:

Moons, Karel GM, and Frank E. Harrell. “Sensitivity and specificity should be de-emphasized in diagnostic accuracy studies.” Academic radiology 10.6 (2003): 670-672. http://hbiostat.org/papers/feh/moons.radiology.pdf

Prince-Guerra JL, Almendares O, Nolen LD, Gunn JKL, Dale AP, Buono SA, Deutsch-Feldman M, Suppiah S, Hao L, Zeng Y, Stevens VA, Knipe K, Pompey J, Atherstone C, Bui DP, Powell T, Tamin A, Harcourt JL, Shewmaker PL, Medrzycki M, Wong P, Jain S, Tejada-Strop A, Rogers S, Emery B, Wang H, Petway M, Bohannon C, Folster JM, MacNeil A, Salerno R, Kuhnert-Tallman W, Tate JE, Thornburg NJ, Kirking HL, Sheiban K, Kudrna J, Cullen T, Komatsu KK, Villanueva JM, Rose DA, Neatherlin JC, Anderson M, Rota PA, Honein MA, Bower WA. Evaluation of Abbott BinaxNOW Rapid Antigen Test for SARS-CoV-2 Infection at Two Community-Based Testing Sites - Pima County, Arizona, November 3-17, 2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2021 Jan 22;70(3):100-105. doi: 10.15585/mmwr.mm7003e3. Erratum in: MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2021 Jan 29;70(4):144. PMID: 33476316; PMCID: PMC7821766. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7003e3-H.pdf

Mahallawi WH, Alsamiri AD, Dabbour AF, Alsaeedi H, Al-Zalabani AH. Association of Viral Load in SARS-CoV-2 Patients With Age and Gender. Front Med (Lausanne). 2021;8:608215. Published 2021 Jan 27. doi:10.3389/fmed.2021.608215

Sjoerd Euser, Sem Aronson, Irene Manders, Steven van Lelyveld, Bjorn Herpers, Jan Sinnige, Jayant Kalpoe, Claudia van Gemeren, Dominic Snijders, Ruud Jansen, Sophie Schuurmans Stekhoven, Marlies van Houten, Ivar Lede, James Cohen Stuart, Fred Slijkerman Megelink, Erik Kapteijns, Jeroen den Boer, Elisabeth Sanders, Alex Wagemakers, Dennis Souverein, SARS-CoV-2 viral-load distribution reveals that viral loads increase with age: a retrospective cross-sectional cohort study, International Journal of Epidemiology, 2021;, dyab145, SARS-CoV-2 viral-load distribution reveals that viral loads increase with age: a retrospective cross-sectional cohort study | International Journal of Epidemiology | Oxford Academic

I appreciate conversations with Anna Park and my brother on this topic.

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