Group Testing for COVID19

Itsik Pe'er, Associate Professor of Engineering, Columbia University Department of Engineering 

Group testing is a cost effective strategy for a post-peak effort to monitor the population for signs of a second wave. This includes identifying the infected sample in a pool based on a design of overlapping, intersecting pools. Many of the computational aspects of this process had been resolved for other, analogous contexts of testing. This project seeks to establish a pooling system (assay recently proven for SARS-Cov-2) for testing a population with sparse infection rates, while saving 1-2 orders of magnitude in resources.