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Health officials are proposing a new way to count how many people have coronavirus. Pooling, or combining, test samples would occur by taking several individual nasal swabs and testing them together. This strategy would save on lab supplies and costs of having to test every single person, they say.
However, the method calls for first assuming that a certain percentage of people are carrying the virus, and then dividing large groups into several smaller pools to test. The downside of the idea is that it wouldn’t work well in hot spots or areas where the percentage expected to test positive is over 10%. The procedure failed in March in Nebraska, where batch tests were done, but the positive rates jumped to 17 percent because of meatpacking outbreaks.
SOURCE: Fox News and The Associated Press July 1, 2020