Improvement of Sensitivity of Pooling Strategies for COVID-19

Figure 3

On three -well plates, pools of samples from each row, each column, and each parallel-shifted diagonal are tested in the first round. Totally, pools are tested in this case. Every individual will be tested in three different pools associated with three corresponding swabs. As false negative rate of a single pool is low (about 10% examined in [11]), the probability of more than one false negative error out of the three pools is relatively lower. Thus, individuals for which at least two pools tested negative are not retested further in the second round.