Related papers: Testing the efficacy of epidemic testing
The spread of COVID-19 makes it essential to investigate its prevalence. In such investigation research, as far as we know, the widely-used sampling methods didn't use the information sufficiently about the numbers of the previously…
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 present a method for efficient estimation of the prevalence of infection in a population with high accuracy using only a small number of tests. The presented approach uses pool testing with a mix of pool sizes of various sizes. The test…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism in the beginning phase of an epidemic when the vaccines are not yet available. It enables the public health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases from the population, thereby limiting the…
In comparison with individual testing, group testing (also known as pooled testing) is more efficient in reducing the number of tests and potentially leading to tremendous cost reduction. As indicated in the recent article posted on the US…
The screening testing is an effective tool to control the early spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. When the total testing capacity is limited, we aim to optimally allocate testing resources among n counties. We build a…
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…
A key requirement in containing contagious diseases, such as the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, is the ability to efficiently carry out mass diagnosis over large populations. Some of the leading testing procedures, such as…
The group testing approach that achieves significant cost reduction over the individual testing approach has received a lot of interest lately for massive testing of COVID-19. Many studies simply assume samples mixed in a group are…
We argue that frequent sampling of the fraction of infected people (either by random testing or by analysis of sewage water), is central to managing the COVID-19 pandemic because it both measures in real time the key variable controlled by…
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…
Testing is recommended for all close contacts of confirmed COVID-19 patients. However, existing group testing methods are oblivious to the circumstances of contagion provided by contact tracing. Here, we build upon a well-known…
In identifying infected patients in a population, group testing is an effective method to reduce the number of tests and correct the test errors. In the group testing procedure, tests are performed on pools of specimens collected from…
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…
Pooled testing is a common strategy for public health disease screening under limited testing resources, allowing multiple biological samples to be tested together with the resources of a single test, at the cost of reduced individual…
We consider the optimal strategy for laboratory testing of biological samples when we wish to know the results for each sample rather than the average prevalence of positive samples. If the proportion of positive samples is low considerable…
CoVID-19 is currently one of the biggest threats to mankind. To date, it is the reason for infections of over 35 lakhs and the death of over 2 lakh human beings. We propose a procedure to detect CoVID-19 affected localities using a sewage…
Testing individuals for pathogens can affect the spread of epidemics. Understanding how individual-level processes of sampling and reporting test results can affect community- or population-level spread is a dynamical modeling question. The…
Long-term care facilities have been widely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Retirement homes are particularly vulnerable due to the higher mortality risk of infected elderly individuals. Once an outbreak occurs, suppressing the spread of…
We propose a mathematical model based on probability theory to optimize COVID-19 testing by a multi-step batch testing approach with variable batch sizes. This model and simulation tool dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of…