April 6, 2020

Predicting Whom to Test is More Important Than More Tests – Modeling the Impact of Testing on the Spread of COVID-19 Virus By True Positive Rate Estimation.

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Testing and Treatment

• The author used modeling to simulate the effects of increasing true positive rates of testing and the number of tests per day on slowing spread of COVID-19, and reports that the true positive rate can increase with large increases in testing or by improving the prediction on whom to test. 
• To better allocate tests, a scoring system could be used based on contacts and locations, demographics, weather, type of places visited and time of day to build a robust model. This model could be used on top of virus spread models and tracking contacts. The article suggests that increasing the true positive by one or two percentage points could have the same impact as increasing the number of tests by tens of thousands. 

Rodriguez (Apr 6, 2020). Predicting Whom to Test is More Important Than More Tests – Modeling the Impact of Testing on the Spread of COVID-19 Virus By True Positive Rate Estimation. Pre-print downloaded Apr 6 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.01.20050393