>>13237397Armchair theory: because we're much more concerned about false negatives than we are about false positives. False negatives (not for COVID in particular, but for many other diseases) could easily kill you. False positives rarely result in much more than some unneeded anxiety.
Your default mental picture of the reliability of a test is
>I have COVID: will this test tell me?because this is the situation that actually matters to you. Switching to
>I might have COVID: will this test get it right?is an unintuitive viewpoint.
