**NOTE** this answer precedes the OP's note about percentages. This answer assumed: * 1/41 is the prior probability of infection in the tested population (not the population as a whole) * 2/1000 is the false negative rate of the PCR test $P(PCR^{-}|Infected)$ ---- I may be confused myself as my calculations do give probabilities summing to 1. > The analytical false positive rate of a PCR test is 2 in 1,000 I assumed you mean *false negative rate*, right? Otherwise how can you have 2.4% true positives (1/41), 6.8% positive tests but only 0.2% false positives? Here's my reasoning. First let's set up a simple tree with 100k people (there is some rounding here): ``` 100000 people | -------------------- | | Infected Not infected P = 1/41 P = 40/41 2439 97561 | | ------------- ------------ | | | | PCR+ PCR- PCR+ PCR- P = 0.998 P = 0.002 P = 0.044 P = 0.956 2434 5 4366 93195 ``` Here `P = 0.044` is the false positive rate and comes from `0.068 - (0.998 * 1/41)`. And here's the probabilities: $$ P(inf^{-}|PCR^{+}) = \frac{P(inf^{-}) \cdot P(PCR^{+}|inf^{-})}{P(inf^{-}) \cdot P(PCR^{+}|inf^{-}) + P(inf^{+}) \cdot P(PCR^{+}|inf^{+})} \\ = \frac{(40/41) \cdot 0.044}{(40/41) \cdot 0.044 + (1/41) \cdot 0.998} = 0.638 $$ and $$ P(inf^{+}|PCR^{+}) = \frac{P(inf^{+}) \cdot P(PCR^{+}|inf^{+})}{P(inf^{-}) \cdot P(PCR^{+}|inf^{-}) + P(inf^{+}) \cdot P(PCR^{+}|inf^{+})} \\ = \frac{(1/41) \cdot 0.998}{(40/41) \cdot 0.044 + (1/41) \cdot 0.998} = 0.362 $$ If I'm correct, your mistake is in using 0.068 as denominator in the Bayes formulas.