论文标题
COVID-19的小组测试：如何停止担心和测试更多
Group Testing for COVID-19: How to Stop Worrying and Test More
论文作者
论文摘要
由新型电晕病毒引起的2019年电晕病毒疾病（CoVID-19）具有指数性感染率。 Covid-19特别臭名昭著，因为感染患者的症状发作通常延迟，并且存在大量无症状携带者。为了防止医疗机构压倒性和死亡率较大，早期测试和诊断是关键要求。在本文中，我们讨论了小组测试文献的方法及其与COVID-19诊断的相关性。具体而言，我们研究了使用聚合酶链反应（PCR）进行COVID-19的组测试效率。小组测试是一种将多个样品组合在一起的方法，对这些组进行了更少的测试以辨别所有受感染的样品。我们研究了由于在小组测试中汇集而引起的稀释效果，并表明即使在存在稀释效应的情况下，小组测试也可以表现良好。我们提出了多种组测试算法，这些算法可以减少用于19009诊断的测试数量。我们分析了这些测试的效率，并就其实际相关性提供了见解。通过使用此处描述的算法，可以制定测试计划，该计划可以使测试中心增加执行的诊断数量而不会增加PCR测试的数量。生成测试计划的代码可在线提供[1]。
The corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the novel corona virus has an exponential rate of infection. COVID-19 is particularly notorious as the onset of symptoms in infected patients are usually delayed and there exists a large number of asymptomatic carriers. In order to prevent overwhelming of medical facilities and large fatality rate, early stage testing and diagnosis are key requirements. In this article, we discuss the methodologies from the group testing literature and its relevance to COVID-19 diagnosis. Specifically, we investigate the efficiency of group testing using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for COVID-19. Group testing is a method in which multiple samples are pooled together in groups and fewer tests are performed on these groups to discern all the infected samples. We study the effect of dilution due to pooling in group testing and show that group tests can perform well even in the presence of dilution effects. We present multiple group testing algorithms that could reduce the number of tests performed for COVID-19 diagnosis. We analyze the efficiency of these tests and provide insights on their practical relevance. With the use of algorithms described here, test plans can be developed that can enable testing centers to increase the number of diagnosis performed without increasing the number of PCR tests. The codes for generating test plans are available online at [1].
