Group Testing: group testing for the coronavirus

Abstract

In 1943, Robert Dorfman published his optimistic paper which was the trigger for the emergence of the idea of group testing (Dorfman, 1943). The idea of Dorfman was to categorise the blood samples into groups (pools), then mixing the samples within each group and perform the test on the new generated samples. Logically, the negative result means that the group does not have any infected sample while the positive result means that the group has one or more infected samples. Consequently, for defining the infected samples, we need to retest the positive groups only; doing so, you can decrease the number of tests needed by excluding the negative groups. This was the core objective of the Dorfman’s method which called later “Group Testing”. Group testing is an investigation technique interested in detecting a small number of defec- tive elements in a large-scale inhabitance by testing pools rather than merely separated items. The result will come positive when the pool used for testing has at least a single defective mem- ber, alternatively, the result will be negative (Aldridge, et al. , 2019). There is consensus among all references mentioned in this project that the first use of the group testing method was in syphilis screening for the American soldiers at the time of world war two. Group testing has been deployed in different areas. One of these areas is medical screening. Also, group testing has been recently applied in estimating COVID- 2019 spread to compute the evolution of the virus.