11.1 Warming-up Exercise
Flu Testing
You are the mayor of a city with population 500,000. Recent reports from the city’s health system suggest an initial outbreaks of a rare influenza virus that could lead to an epidemic. Your health commissioner recommends a quarantine to stop the spread of disease. However, the diagnostic tests are imperfect so you need a reliable method to identify the illness. Three different labs have been working with your team, and have developed diagnostic tests to identify if a person has this new virus, versus traditional seasonal influenza.
Your city health commissioner provided you with the following information to compare companies.
| Valora, Inc. | Prueba, Inc. | Evalua, Ltd. | |
| Efficiency | 2 days | 6 days | 4 days |
| % of error | 0.008 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Price per test | $12 | $ 13 | $ 10 |
- Which company provides the best test option? Why?
- How can you use these objectives to make a decision?
Attribution
By Luis F. Luna-Reyes, Erika Martin amd Mikhail Ivonchyk, and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
