Analysis and Applications of Adaptive Group Testing Methods for COVID-19
Open Access
- 7 April 2020
- preprint content
- other
- Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Abstract
Testing strategies for Covid-19 to maximize number of people tested are urgently needed. Recently, it has been demonstrated that RT-PCR has the sensitivity to detect one positive case in a mixed sample of 32 cases [12], In this paper we propose adaptive group testing strategies based on generalized binary splitting (CBS) [5], where we restrict the group test to the largest group that can be used. The method starts by choosing a group from the population to be tested, performing a test on the combined sample from the entire group, and progressively splitting the group further into subgroups. Compared to individual testing at 4% prevalence, we save 74%; at 1% we save 91%; and at .1% we save 98% of tests. We analyze the number of times each sample is used and show that the method is still efficient if we resort to testing a case individually if the sample is running low.In addition we recommend clinical screening to filter out individuals with symptoms and show this leaves us with a population with lower prevalence. Our approach is particularly applicable to vulnerable confined populations such as nursing homes, prisons, military ships and cruise ships.Keywords
This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- Correlation of Chest CT and RT-PCR Testing for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China: A Report of 1014 CasesRadiology, 2020
- Evaluation of Group Testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNAPublished by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory ,2020
- Evaluation of COVID-19 RT-qPCR test in multi-sample poolsPublished by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory ,2020
- Group Testing: An Information Theory PerspectiveFoundations and Trends® in Communications and Information Theory, 2018
- A Method for Detecting all Defective Members in a Population by Group TestingJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1972
- The Detection of Defective Members of Large PopulationsThe Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 1943