Efficient sample pooling strategies for COVID-19 data gathering

Istvan Szapudi

As the CoViD-19 pandemic sweeps through the planet, data gathering is desperately needed for understanding the spread of the disease, the fraction of the population infected, and the case fatality rate (CFR) and infection fatality rate (IFR) for each age group (1) (2) (3) . In most countries, only symptomatic individuals are tested referred by their attending physicians due to the scarcity of tests.The bottleneck is the expense and availability of the PCR test kits for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Yet, massive surveys could make a big impact on decisions about influencing the behavior of the populace to mitigate the effects of the pandemic in a non-pharmaceutical fashion, such as invoking a general or partial lock down. Sample pooling, carried out as mixing of samples, e.g., saliva, from several individuals, provides a cost effective solution for massive testing of the population at large. Recently, a protocol has been developed for sample pooling for CoViD-19 tests (4, 5) . In addition, a group proposes to test the whole population of Hungary in batches of 15-64 (6) . Sample pooling has been considered since World War II. for a wide variety of applications, (e.g., 7, 8, and references therein). In these notes we perform the fundamental calculations to support the design of efficient surveys with pooled samples.