Related papers: Variable pool testing for infection spread estimat…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
To make informative public policy decisions in battling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to know the disease prevalence in a population. There are two intertwined difficulties in estimating this prevalence based on testing…
Repeated asymptomatic screening for SARS-CoV-2 promises to control spread of the virus but would require too many resources to implement at scale. Group testing is promising for screening more people with fewer test resources: multiple…
Controlling the COVID-19 pandemic is an urgent global challenge. The rapid geographic spread of SARS-CoV-2 directly reflects the social structure. Before effective vaccines and treatments are widely available, we have to rely on…
Fast testing can help mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite their accuracy for single sample analysis, infectious diseases diagnostic tools, like RT-PCR, require substantial resources to test large populations.…
We propose a novel testing and containment strategy in order to contain the spread of SARS-CoV2 while permitting large parts of the population to resume social and economic activity. Our approach recognises the fact that testing capacities…
An important component of every country's COVID-19 response is fast and efficient testing - to identify and isolate cases, as well as for early detection of local hotspots. For many countries, producing a sufficient number of tests has been…
We present a simple technique to compare the development of the Covid-19 epidemic in different regions, based only on the time series of confirmed cases. Weekly new infections, taken for every day, are interpreted as infection potential of…
Pooled testing is widely used for screening for viral or bacterial infections with low prevalence when individual testing is not cost-efficient. Pooled testing with qualitative assays that give binary results has been well-studied. However,…
The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the novel corona virus has an exponential rate of infection. COVID-19 is particularly notorious as the onset of symptoms in infected patients are usually delayed and there exists a large…
In this paper we define for a Bernoulli samples the \emph{ empirical infection measure}, which counts the number of positives (infections) in the Bernoulli sample and for the \emph{ pool samples} we define the empirical pool infection…
Multiple heterogeneous data sources are becoming increasingly available for statistical analyses in the era of big data. As an important example in finite-population inference, we develop a unified framework of the test-and-pool approach to…
Medical diagnostic testing can be made significantly more efficient using pooled testing protocols. These typically require a sparse infection signal and use either binary or real-valued entries of O(1). However, existing methods do not…
We consider real-time timely tracking of infection status (e.g., covid-19) of individuals in a population. In this work, a health care provider wants to detect infected people as well as people who recovered from the disease as quickly as…
We propose a compressed sensing-based testing approach with a practical measurement design and a tuning-free and noise-robust algorithm for detecting infected persons. Compressed sensing results can be used to provably detect a small number…
We propose a monitoring strategy for efficient and robust estimation of disease prevalence and case numbers within closed and enumerated populations such as schools, workplaces, or retirement communities. The proposed design relies largely…
I propose novel partial identification bounds on infection prevalence from information on test rate and test yield. The approach utilizes user-specified bounds on (i) test accuracy and (ii) the extent to which tests are targeted, formalized…
Detection of defective members of large populations has been widely studied in the statistics community under the name "group testing", a problem which dates back to World War II when it was suggested for syphilis screening. There the main…
There are many hard-to-reconcile numbers circulating concerning Covid-19. Using reports from random testing, the fatality ratio per infection is evaluated and used to extract further information on the actual fraction of infections and the…
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…