Title: Mathematical formation and analysis of COVID-19 pool tests strategies

Authors: S. Chandel, G. Bhatnagar and K.P. Singh

Journal: Epidemiologic Methods Volume: 10 (issue S1)

Year: 2021

Publisher: De Gruyter

Abstract: The excessive spread of the pandemic COVID-19 around the globe has put mankind at risk. The medical infrastructure and resources are frazzled, even for the world's top economies, due to the large COVID-19 infection. To cope up with this situation, countries are exploring the pool test strategies. In this paper, a detailed analysis has been done to explore the efficient pooling strategies. Given a population and the known fact that the percentage of people infected by the virus, the minimum number of tests to identify COVID-19 positive cases from the entire population are found. In this paper, the problem is formulated with an objective to find a minimum number of tests in the worst case where exactly one positive sample is there in a pool which can happen considering the fact that the groups are formed by choosing samples randomly. Therefore, the thrust stress is on minimizing the total number of tests by finding varying pool sizes at different levels (not necessarily same size at all levels), although levels can also be controlled.