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People seem to be missing the point of this article. Pooled testing is accepted and routine. The point of the article is that by constructing pools and subpools
by zmmmmm 6y ago
People seem to be missing the point of this article. Pooled testing is accepted and routine. The point of the article is that by constructing pools and subpools in a particular way you can dramatically speed up the process by exercising in parallel / up front all the possible testing paths that would normally have to occur in series so that the individual(s) who are positive are identified in only one round of testing - giving a crucial advantage in a time sensitive situation such as contact tracing for infectious diseases.
- rgbrenner 6y agoYes, and it's already been done for covid. In may, China wanted to test all 11m people in Wuhan, so they used pooled testing: https://www.livescience.com/pooled-sampling-covid19-in-wuhan-and-us-cities.html https://www.livescience.com/pooled-sampling-covid19-in-wuhan...
- FuckButtons 6y agoThe algorithm presented in this paper is a significant improvement over what was done in wuhan. In a low infection population it reduces the cost of testing an individual to around $0.75 and can find infected individuals in a single step, without having to do subsequent assays to narrow down which samples tested positive.
- bhickey 6y agoArray testing is an improvement over Dorfman, but this has been widely known for decades. Blood banks regularly use high dimensional arrays for testing. Here they test the hypercube planes in serial instead of parallel, but this increases latency and decreases sensitivity.