COVID 19 Pooling Strategies

Vincent Lee, Daisy Chen, Jeffrey Chu , Ethan Dinh
All work shown in this website was led under the supervision of Arya Mazumdar
For a link to our project repository CLICK HERE

Introduction

COVID-19 rapid tests have been the primary method of identifying positive individuals to slow the spread of the pandemic, but this process is inefficiently rate-limited by not only the thousands of tests run each day, but also the resource cost to run these samples individually. Each rapid test can take up to 6 hours to run in the laboratory[1], which can quickly be delayed based on the sheer number of daily tests given each day. Instead of running individual tests, a group-testing schema, proposed by Robert Dorfman during the Second World War, combined multiple individual samples to form one cohesive pool that is tested once[2]. If a positive test is returned, one test is wasted and the group would be retested again, but if a negative test is returned, several tests are conserved as every member in the pool is labeled as negative. Our research will expand on this group-testing pooling scheme, introducing 5 different pooling algorithims.