Help with COVID-19 prevalence study - Retesting the positives

Hi @cucho,

Here’s a fresh derivation, due to my friend Leo Bastos. Please note that the probability he derives and the one I did above are not for the same event. Nevertheless, I believe his derivation is clearer and more useful and hence my post (and edits) above should be all but disregarded.

Let R \in \{0, 1\} be the true disease status and let \gamma_i and \delta_i be the specificity and sensitivity of test i, respectively.
Let Y be the outcome of a re-testing positives only strategy, i.e. Y=1 if tests 1 and 2 are both positive, and Y=0 otherwise. So

\begin{align*} p_2 := \operatorname{Pr}( Y = 1) & = \operatorname{Pr}(Y = 1 , R = 1) + \operatorname{Pr}(Y = 1 , R = 0),\\ & = \operatorname{Pr}(Y = 1 \mid R = 1) \operatorname{Pr}(R = 1) + \operatorname{Pr}(Y = 1 \mid R = 0) \operatorname{Pr}(R = 0),\\ & = \operatorname{Pr}(T_2 = 1 , T_1 = 1\mid R = 1) \operatorname{Pr}(R = 1) + \operatorname{Pr}(T_2 = 1 , T_1 = 1\mid R = 0) \operatorname{Pr}(R = 0), \\ & = \operatorname{Pr}(T_2 = 1 \mid T_1 = 1, R = 1) \operatorname{Pr}(T_1 = 1\mid R = 1) \operatorname{Pr}(R = 1) + \\ & + \operatorname{Pr}(T_2 = 1 \mid T_1 = 1, R = 0) \operatorname{Pr}(T_1 = 1\mid R = 0) \operatorname{Pr}(R = 0), \\ & = \delta_2 \delta_1 \pi + (1 - \gamma_2)(1 - \gamma_1) (1 - \pi) \end{align*}

where the last line follows if we assume that the two tests are conditionally independent given R.

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