Using random testing to manage a safe exit from the COVID-19 lockdown

Markus Mueller; Peter Derlet; Christopher Mudry; Gabriel Aeppli

Having random testing in place, the risk of a second wave can be kept to a minimum. Additional testing capacity of r = 15 000 day −1 tests (on top of the current tests for medical purposes) carried out with randomly selected people would allow us to follow the course of the pandemics almost in real time, without huge time delays, and without the danger of increasing the number of currently infected people by more than a factor of four, if our intervention strategy is followed. We emphasize that our estimate of r is conservative. If the manageable fraction of infected people is higher than what we assumed in Eq. (14b), namely of order i c ≈ 0.01 as the estimates of Ref. [4] suggest, the required testing rate decreases by a factor 3 − 4 to a mere r = 4 000 − 5 000 day −1 .