What Is Pool Testing?
U.S. leaders are considering a new strategy for more efficient Covid-19 surveillance
Health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci have mentioned in recent interviews that U.S. leadership is considering a strategy called “pool testing” or “batch testing” as an efficient way to test large swaths of people for Covid-19.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator for the White House’s coronavirus task force, said recently that “pooling would give us the capacity to go from a half a million tests a day to potentially 5 million individuals tested per day.”
How does it work?
On a basic level, pool testing is a way to do disease surveillance without the need to run tests for every individual person (though you still need their samples). It’s when samples from multiple people — like say, coronavirus nasal swabs — are tested together in a single tube. Even though the samples are mixed together, the test provides a single result for that grouping of samples.
One of the best explanations of how it works logistically is from Scientific American:
Group testing is a numbers game. Let’s say you are examining 100 people, and one of them is positive. Normally you would do 100 diagnostic tests, searching for genetic material from the virus in each…
