How Covid-19 Testing Can Become More Efficient

Mathematical Decision Support that calculates which method is most effective in identifying all Covid-19 patients in a positive sample pool [ Picture: Timo de Wolff/TU Braunschweig] With the help of so-called pooling procedures, samples from different people can be combined into a pool and tested for Covid-19 collectively in a single test kit. An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, computer scientists and medical doctors from the Junge Akademie, the Technische Universität Braunschweig, the Universität Stuttgart and the company Arctoris has developed a decision support tool that calculates which method is most effective in identifying all Covid-19 patients in a positive sample pool. Their simulations show that in Germany, pool-based test methods can be about eight times more efficient than individual tests at a low infection rate. The team recently published the results in a preprint on "arXiv" and as a website. In sample pooling, the sample material of different people is combined into one sample (pool) and tested together. This can save time and test capacities when the infection rate is low compared to individual testing. If the sample is negative, none of the individual samples contained in the pool need to be tested separately.