Efficient high throughput SARS-CoV-2 testing to detect asymptomatic carriers

Noam Shental; Shlomia Levy; Shosh Skorniakov; Vered Wuvshet; Yonat Shemer-Avni; Angel Porgador; Tomer Hertz

The COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly spreading throughout the world. Recent reports suggest that 10-30% of SARS-CoV-2 infected patients are asymptomatic [1] [2] [3] . Other studies report that some subjects have significant viral shedding prior to symptom onset 4 . Since both asymptomatic and presymptomatic subjects can spread the disease 1,2 , identifying such individuals is critical for effective control of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. A major bottleneck of managing the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries is diagnostic testing which is primarily performed on symptomatic patients, due to limited laboratory capabilities as well as limited access to genome-extraction and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) reagents. Hence, there is an urgent need to increase diagnostic testing capabilities in order to allow screening of asymptomatic populations which contribute to disease spread. In fact, such tests will be routinely required until a vaccine is developed. If the percentage of carriers in the tested set of samples is sufficiently low (~1%), the method can correctly identify all positive individuals using a much smaller number of diagnostic tests as compared to testing each individual sample separately.