coronavirus testing

What Is Pooled Testing? How Lessons From the HIV Epidemic Could Help Fight COVID-19

A coronavirus test kit is seen in its protective pouch on a table as health care staff members from the FoundCare center help people who called to setup a drive through appointments to be tested for the coronavirus in the centers parking lot on March 16, 2020 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Image

A testing strategy that helped fight HIV could offer the United States a window into the severity of the coronavirus outbreak, NBC News reported.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force is considering sample pooling, also known as pooled testing, as a way to ramp up local authorities’ ability to determine the extent of the infection in their areas, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNBC on Friday.

“It’s not going well. I have to tell you, it’s not going well,” he said in an interview with CNBC’s Meg Tirrell. “What we need to do is we need to rethink, and we are right now, the idea of many more tests getting into the community and even pooling tests.”

Pool testing involves taking samples from multiple people and testing them together in a single batch.

It doesn’t distinguish whether individual samples are positive or negative. If the results come back negative, all of the samples are reasonably assumed to be negative. If the results come back positive, the lab needs to go back to each individual sample and retest it to find out which is positive and which is negative.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

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