I believe it is not quite so simple. First people want binary answers, yes/no, but we live in an analog world. Telling someone they have an 80% chance of having Covid is just not a very satisfying answer. This is a result of constraints when designing the probes because you have to make trade offs; such as the longer the sequence the more unique it is, but less impact individual mismatches have on the overall binding. Still in the original SARS outbreak PCR was able to pull SARS out amongst all the millions of viruses that typically inhabit a human body. With this virus perhaps because we didn't understand the typical progression of the disease and as a result Chinese doctors where finding patients that definitely were suffering from Covid based on lung scans, but were still showing up PCR negative not understanding that the virus was gone at this point and the damage was being caused by an immune over reaction rather than the virus itself. Yet still the sensitivity of the test was ramped up so it could detect the few virus fragments still remaining at this stage of the disease. Of course, if you ramp of the sensitivity of the test enough to detect these few remaining fragments if they are not present then the probes are not pulled out of the solution and are going to bind to the next closest match, all be it not as well, but with no competition, good enough to produce a signal with enough amplification, thus you start getting false positives. Now if Covid were Ebola and people had a 50% chance of dying than yes, lets error on the side of caution, but Covid is not that and a simple way to make the PCR test useful is simple provide the CT (cycle threshold) number thus allowing one to determine the probability they actually currently have the infection. A CT less than 20 and you likely have sufficient virus particles to be infectious as you head towards a CT of 30 that becomes less and less probable. On the 3 probe test if only two probes detect a match, you likely have Omicron instead of Delta, because Omicron has mutated enough so one of the probes no longer matches well enough. So I don't think you should blame the test only how its results are being interpreted. People may regret the EUA on the PCR test ending with rapid test being in short supply, the determinant of whether you have Covid or not may become whether you are Vaccinated or not. If yes its just the flu if not it must be Covid. Of course, the answer doesn't change, get plenty of sleep, avoid all highly processed foods, get plenty of sunshine or at least Vit D, and spend as much time as you can outside playing/interacting with friends, especially if you're over 70.