A single false negative is worse than a single false positive, but false positives affect far more people with equivalent percentages. They’re both problematic, but in different ways.
Our medical infrastructure is already strained. If you tell 100x the number of actually infected people that they are infected, everything will grind time a halt.
It’s important to find a balance. A single false negative could be disastrous—but so could 1000 false positives. If the false negative and false positive rate are both 10%, and 0.1% of the population is infected, there will be 1000 false positives for every false negative. Both of those are going to cause huge (but very different) problems.
