Este artigo é um Preprint
Preprints são relatos preliminares de pesquisa que não foram certificados pela revisão por pares. Eles não devem ser considerados para orientar a prática clínica ou comportamentos relacionados à saúde e não devem ser publicados na mídia como informação estabelecida.
Preprints publicados online permitem que os autores recebam feedback rápido, e toda a comunidade científica pode avaliar o trabalho independentemente e responder adequadamente. Estes comentários são publicados juntamente com os preprints para qualquer pessoa ler e servir como uma avaliação pós-publicação.
Efficient prevalence estimation and infected sample identification with group testing for SARS-CoV-2
Preprint
em En
| PREPRINT-MEDRXIV
| ID: ppmedrxiv-20086801
ABSTRACT
Extensive virological testing is central to SARS-CoV-2 containment, but many settings face severe limitations on testing. Group testing offers a way to increase throughput by testing pools of combined samples; however, most proposed designs have not yet addressed key concerns over sensitivity loss and implementation feasibility. Here, we combine a mathematical model of epidemic spread and empirically derived viral kinetics for SARS-CoV-2 infections to identify pooling designs that are robust to changes in prevalence, and to ratify losses in sensitivity against the time course of individual infections. Using this framework, we show that prevalence can be accurately estimated across four orders of magnitude using only a few dozen pooled tests without the need for individual identification. We then exhaustively evaluate the ability of different pooling designs to maximize the number of detected infections under various resource constraints, finding that simple pooling designs can identify up to 20 times as many positives compared to individual testing with a given budget. We illustrate how pooling affects sensitivity and overall detection capacity during an epidemic and on each day post infection, finding that sensitivity loss is mainly attributed to individuals sampled at the end of infection when detection for public health containment has minimal benefit. Crucially, we confirm that our theoretical results can be accurately translated into practice using pooled human nasopharyngeal specimens. Our results show that accounting for variation in sampled viral loads provides a nuanced picture of how pooling affects sensitivity to detect epidemiologically relevant infections. Using simple, practical group testing designs can vastly increase surveillance capabilities in resource-limited settings.
cc_by_nc
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
09-preprints
Base de dados:
PREPRINT-MEDRXIV
Tipo de estudo:
Diagnostic_studies
/
Experimental_studies
/
Observational_studies
/
Prognostic_studies
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2020
Tipo de documento:
Preprint