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Coronavirus Vocabulary You Should Know
Contact tracing, false positives, and more
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1 min readMay 1, 2020
Coronavirus terms you need to know. Writer Robert Roy Britt compiled a glossary of words and terms that could use a little defining to improve understanding of the virus, the disease, and the scientific analysis and mainstream reporting of it.
- Contact tracing: Finding people who came in contact with an infected person and letting them know they may have been exposed. Scientists say this will be one of several crucial tasks needed to inform where, when, and how to restart the economy.
- False positive: A conclusion that something is true when it is not, such as results indicating a drug works when in fact it doesn’t, or that a person has a disease when they don’t. A false negative, naturally, happens when something is not detected when it’s in fact there. These errors or oversights can occur due to faulty tests, inadequate data or bad analysis.
- R0: Pronounced “R naught,” the R0 is a “reproduction number” for a disease, signifying the average number of cases each infected person will cause. It’s one factor in determining the potential spreadability of a disease.
Read the full glossary below.
