论文标题
大规模加速感染测试：对多名患者进行单个测试推断的建议
Accelerated infection testing at scale: a proposal for inference with single test on multiple patients
论文作者
论文摘要
在大流行病或流行病中，公共卫生当局需要迅速测试大量个人，以确定治疗范围以及知道感染的传播以计划遏制，缓解和未来的反应。但是，缺乏足够的测试套件可能是一种瓶颈，尤其是在意外的新疾病（例如Covid-19）的情况下，测试技术，制造能力，分配，分销，人类技能和实验室可能无法使用或供不应求。此外，标准PCR测试的成本约为48美元，这对于较贫穷的患者和大多数政府而言是高度敏感的。我们通过提出一种测试方法来解决这一瓶颈，该方法在一次测试中从两名（或更多）患者中汇集样本。关键的见解是，汇总样本的单个阴性结果可能意味着所有患者的阴性感染。因此，它排除了对患者的进一步测试。因此，该协议需要更少的测试。但是，这可能导致虚假负面因素增加。我们的模拟表明，将两名具有7％潜在可能感染可能性的患者的样品结合在一起，这意味着需要减少36％的测试套件，其中额外的时间为14％。
In pandemics or epidemics, public health authorities need to rapidly test a large number of individuals, both to determine the line of treatment as well as to know the spread of infection to plan containment, mitigation and future responses. However, the lack of adequate testing kits could be a bottleneck, especially in the case of unanticipated new diseases, such as COVID-19, where the testing technology, manufacturing capability, distribution, human skills and laboratories might be unavailable or in short supply. In addition, the cost of the standard PCR test is approximately USD 48, which is prohibitive for poorer patients and most governments. We address this bottleneck by proposing a test methodology that pools the sample from two (or more) patients in a single test. The key insight is that a single negative result from a pooled sample likely implies negative infection of all the individual patients. and It thereby rules out further tests for the patients. This protocol, therefore, requires significantly fewer tests. This may, however, result in somewhat increased false negatives. Our simulations show that combining samples from two patients with 7% underlying likelihood of infection implies that 36% fewer test kits are required, with 14% additional units of time for testing.
