Hey eli5,
I’ve been an RRT for eight years, and I feel like I’m strong clinically; but one thing I’ve struggled with is the concepts of Sensitivity and Specificity. I’ve gargled this time and time again and it never sinks in. I’d like to advance my education but it feels like if I can’t get this why try?
tl;dr Can someone help me cement the concepts of Sensitivity and Specificity by explaining it like I’m 5??
Thank you
In: 2
To put it plainly, sensitivity is how likely a test is to spot the thing its testing for. So let’s just say you have covid-19. Sensitivity of a test is how likely that test is to correctly spot the causative virus. A highly Sensitive test will spot it most of the time, a test with low sensitivity won’t spot it very often and might say you’re covid free when you are actually infected with it.
Specificity is how likely it is to not get confused and spot the wrong thing. So again, if you have covid-19 a test with low specificity might come back and say you’ve got Covid-19 when you don’t, because you *are* carrying a similar virus. A test that is highly specific will only say you have the virus when you do actually have the virus.
So ideally we want a test that is specific and sensitive. As these tests will spot pathogen most of the time and won’t get confused by similar pathogens, so you can trust their accuracy.
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