Evaluation of pool-based testing approaches to enable population-wide screening for COVID-19
Fig 2
The best pool size (lowest total time) depends on the infection rate, here for ir = 1%, 10%, 20%.
For low infection rates, all methods but 2-level pooling prefer pool sizes that are as large as possible. With increasing infection rate, the optimal pool size decreases—with the exception of the Sobel-R1 method—until they approach pool size 1. Parameters: sensitivity p = 0.99, false positive rate q = 0.01, population 50, 000, test duration 5h, averaged over 10 runs. Blue: individual testing; orange: 2-level pooling; green: binary splitting; red: recursive binary splitting; purple: Purim; brown: Sobel-R1.