Pool Testing for COVID-19: Suitable Splitting Procedure and Pool Size for India

OBJECTIVE: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has emerged as a global pandemic for public health due to the large scale outbreak, therefore there is an urgent need to detect the infected cases quickly and isolate them in order to suppress the further spread of the disease. This study tries to identify a suitable pool testing method and algorithm for COVID-19. METHODS: This study tries to derive a general equation for the number of tests required for a pooled sample to detect every infected individual in the specific pool. The gain in pool testing over the normal procedure is quantified by the percentage of tests required compared to individual testing. RESULTS: The percentage of tests required by the pool testing strategy varies according to the different splitting procedures, the size of the pooled sample, and the probability of an individual being infected in the population. If the probability of infection is 0.05, then for a pool size of 32, only 14 tests are sufficient to detect every infected individual. CONCLUSION: The number of tests required to detect infected individuals by using the pooling method is much lower than individual testing. This may help us with increasing our testing capacity for COVID-19 by testing a large number of individuals in less time with limited resources.