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

While our current pooling design provides an 8-fold increase in testing efficiency, this can be further improved by increasing the number of samples per pool. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that a positive sample can be detected even within a pool of 128 subjects, which would allow efficient testing of >1000 samples. P-BEST is optimized for efficiently testing populations with low carrier frequencies (1.3% in this case). It is therefore best suited for screening asymptomatic populations that are not at high risk of being infected, excluding for example subjects who were in close contact with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases. Importantly, if the carrier frequency is above 1.3%, P-BEST will lose efficiency, but in turn may help identifying SARS-CoV-2 hotspots. Code and protocols required for implementation of P-BEST can be found at https://github.com/NoamShental/PBEST.