Safer reopening will require millions more Covid-19 tests per day. One solution: ‘pool testing’
If the country wants to crank up its Covid-19 testing capacity into the millions — the range that could be required for safer reopenings of businesses and universities — experts say it’s time to ramp up a technique known as “pool testing.”
It’s a simple construct: combine — or pool — samples from multiple people and test them as a group for the coronavirus. It’s a way to dramatically and efficiently increase volume, to churn through what you expect to be a lot of negative samples at a fast clip.
