Pooling Samples to Increase SARS‑CoV‑2 Testing

Abstract

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to propagate around the world, it
is becoming increasingly important to scale up testing. This is necessary
both at the individual level, to inform diagnosis, treatment and contract
tracing, as well as at the population level to inform policies to control
spread of the infection. The gold-standard RT-qPCR test for the virus is
relatively expensive and takes time, so combining multiple samples into
“pools” that are tested together has emerged as a useful way to test
many individuals with less than one test per person. Here, we describe
the basic idea behind pooling of samples and different methods for
reconstructing the result for each individual from the test of pooled samples.
The methods range from simple pooling, where each pool is disjoint
from the other, to more complex combinatorial pooling where each sample
is split into multiple pools and each pool has a specified combination
of samples. We describe efforts to validate these testing methods clinically
and the potential advantages of the combinatorial pooling method
named Tapestry Pooling that relies on compressed sensing techniques