Testing the efficacy of epidemic testing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a practical, community-focused pooling testing strategy for epidemic control, emphasizing optimality based on disease spread and community utility rather than just testing efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, customizable pooling testing method that balances community priorities, budget, and risks, offering a practical alternative to complex strategies.

Findings

Proposes a pooling testing strategy tailored to community needs.

Highlights the importance of optimizing testing based on disease spread.

Offers a practical, easy-to-implement approach for epidemic containment.

Abstract

The cataclysmic contagion based calamity -- Covid-19 has shown us a clear need for a comprehensive community based strategy that overcomes the sheer complexity of controlling it and the caveats of current methods. In this regard, as seen in earlier epidemics, testing has always been an integral part of containment policy. But one has to consider the optimality of a testing scheme based on the resultant disease spread in the community and not based on purely increasing testing efficiency. Therefore, taking a decision is no easy feat and must consider the community utility constrained by its priorities, budget, risks, collateral and abilities which can be encoded into the optimization of the strategy. We thus propose a simple pooling strategy that is easy to customize and practical to implement, unlike other complex and computationally intensive methods.