America carries out roughly 800,000 covid-19 tests a day. A study by Harvard University reckons that the country would need to do 5m a day to reopen safely
beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, many places have struggled with overwhelmed laboratories and a shortage of testing kits. In March, Germany was carrying out half the tests it needed. In Britain testing was limited until May to health-care workers, hospital patients and key workers. In America shortages of various components required for testing have been a cause of constant frustration.
A technique developed in the 1940s by Robert Dorfman, an American economist, may help resolve the problem. Dorfman proposed it as a way of testing soldiers en masse for syphilis. It is, in fact, quite obvious: pool together samples taken from several individuals and test the pool. If it is clear, none of its members is infected, and only one test has been used. Only if the pool comes up positive is individual testing required.
Testing pooled samples has its difficulties. For now, samples must be labelled by hand, which is slow. There are also concerns about loss of sensitivity that may result from dilution if too many samples are mixed. A group of researchers from Technion, Israel’s oldest university, and Rambam Health Care Campus, in Haifa, have said that up to 64 samples could be mixed, but they acknowledge that a pool this large would be difficult to manage and could have a higher risk of a false-negative result.
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