THE MATHEMATICAL STRATEGY THAT COULD TRANSFORM CORONAVIRUS TESTING

Abstract

"In the current epidemic, there is a need to test an extremely large number of patients, making pooling an attractive option," says Roy Kishony, a systems biologist at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Increasing the number of dimensions, for example from a square to a cube, allows for larger group sizes and higher gains in efficiency, says Neil Turok, a theoretical physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a study co-author. Co-author Leon Mutesa, a geneticist at the University of Rwanda in Kigali, who is also part of the government task force, says that he has identified one positive sample in a pool of 100 in the lab.