A Regional Pooling Intervention in a High-Throughput COVID-19 Diagnostic Laboratory to Enhance Throughput, Save Resources and Time Over a Period of 6 Months

An effective and rapid diagnosis has great importance in tackling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic through isolation of the infected individuals to curb the transmission and initiation of specialized treatment for the disease. It has been proven that enhanced testing capacities contribute to efficiently curbing SARS-CoV-2 transmission during the initial phases of the outbreaks. RT-qPCR is considered a gold standard for the diagnosis of COVID-19. However, in resource-limited countries expenses for molecular diagnosis limits the diagnostic capacities. Here, we present interventions of two pooling strategies as 5 sample pooling (P-5) and 10 sample pooling (P-10) in a high-throughput COVID-19 diagnostic laboratory to enhance throughput and save resources and time over a period of 6 months. The diagnostic capacity was scaled-up 2.15-folds in P-5 and 1.8-fold in P-10, reagents (toward RNA extraction and RT-qPCR) were preserved at 75.24% in P-5 and 86.21% in P-10, and time saved was 6,290.93 h in P-5 and 3147.3 h in P-10.