Related papers: Boosting test-efficiency by pooled testing strateg…
In times of outbreaks, an essential requirement for better monitoring is the evaluation of the number of undiagnosed infected individuals. An accurate estimate of this fraction is crucial for the assessment of the situation and the…
Group testing allows saving chemical reagents, analysis time, and costs, by testing pools of samples instead of individual samples. We introduce a class of group testing protocols with small dilution, suited to operate even at high…
As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness…
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing is the gold standard for diagnosing COVID-19. PCR amplifies the virus DNA 40 times to produce measurements of viral loads that span seven orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the outputs of these tests…
We present several related methods for creating confidence intervals to assess disease prevalence in variety of survey sampling settings. These include simple random samples with imperfect tests, weighted sampling with perfect tests, and…
Consider a collection of objects, some of which may be `bad', and a test which determines whether or not a given sub-collection contains no bad objects. The non-adaptive pooling (or group testing) problem involves identifying the bad…
Testing for infection with SARS-CoV-2 is an important intervention in reducing onwards transmission of COVID-19, particularly when combined with the isolation and contact-tracing of positive cases. Many countries with the capacity to do so…
The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has emphasized the importance and challenges of correctly interpreting antibody test results. Identification of positive and negative samples requires a…
We present double pooling, a simple, easy-to-implement variation on test pooling, that in certain ranges for the a priori probability of a positive test, is significantly more efficient than the standard single pooling approach (the Dorfman…
Testing is an important part of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Availability of testing is a bottleneck due to constrained resources and effective prioritization of individuals is necessary. Here, we discuss the impact of different…
We develop a statistical model for the testing of disease prevalence in a population. The model assumes a binary test result, positive or negative, but allows for biases in sample selection and both type I (false positive) and type II…
Objectives: To provide an overall quality assessment of the methods used for COVID-19-related studies using propensity score matching (PSM). Study Design and Setting: A systematic search was conducted in June 2021 on PubMed to identify…
We estimate the reduction in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 achievable by surveillance testing of a susceptible population at different frequencies, comparing the cases of both the original Wuhan strain and the Delta variant. We estimate the…
We introduce a new probabilistic model to estimate the real spread of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus along regions or countries. Our model simulates the behavior of each individual in a population according to a probabilistic model through an…
The COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges for continuing economic activity while reducing health risks. While these challenges can be mitigated through testing, testing budget is often limited. Here we study how institutions, such as nursing…
Rapid testing of appropriate specimens from patients suspected for a disease during an epidemic, such as the current Coronavirus outbreak, is of a great importance for the disease management and control. We propose a method to enhance…
High dimensional case control studies are ubiquitous in the biological sciences, particularly genomics. To maximise power while constraining cost and to minimise type-1 error rates, researchers typically seek to replicate findings in a…
There are multiple testing methods to ascertain an infection in an individual and they vary in their performances, cost and delay. Unfortunately, better performing tests are sometimes costlier and time consuming and can only be done for a…
The CoVid-19 is spreading pandemically all over the world. A rapid defeat of the pandemic requires carrying out on the population a mass screening, able to separate positive from negative cases. Such a cleaning will free a flow of…
COVID-19 testing has become a standard approach for estimating prevalence which then assist in public health decision making to contain and mitigate the spread of the disease. The sampling designs used are often biased in that they do not…