Accelerating COVID‐19 testing: An experimental approach

• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Author: Chandramouli Ganesan,Manikandan Vandavasi,Amol S. Dhaigude
• Date: 01 February 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2827

PRACTITIONER PAPER

Accelerating COVID-19 testing: An experimental approach

Chandramouli Ganesan

1

| Manikandan Vandavasi

2

| Amol S. Dhaigude

3

1

Manager Global Delivery, GEP Solutions Pvt.

Ltd., Navi Mumbai, India

2

Lead Analyst-Data Science, Infosys Limited,

Bengaluru, India

3

T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal

Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India

Correspondence

Amol S. Dhaigude, T A Pai Management

Institute, Manipal Academy of Higher

Education, Manipal, India.

Email: amol.dhaigude@manipal.edu.in

The COVID-19 pandemic, ever since its global outbreak in 2020, has continued to

wreak havoc. Governments across the world were compelled to enforce strict

nation-wide lockdowns, while emphasising on social distancing and quarantining sus-

pected people in order to slow down the spread of the virus. During this time, there

was a massive increase in demand for COVID-19 test kits. However, given the lim-

ited supply, countries were finding it hard to test enough people. This study proposes

an approach called Encoded Blending (EB) to increase the number of tests drastically,

without increasing the number of test kits. EB modifies the pooled testing method;

this has been followed by countries like Germany, Israel and South Korea for mass

testing their citizens. EB has the potential to reduce test kits requirement by up to

85% and 80% in a population with 5% and 10% affected cases, respectively.

KEYWORDS

COVID-19, experiment, India, pandemic control, pooled testing, test kits

1|INTRODUCTION

On 31 December 2019, the country office of World Health

Organization (WHO) in China was informed of cases of pneumonia of

unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected specifically in Wuhan

city, in the Hubei Province. The Chinese authorities later (on 7 January

2020) identified this as a new type of Coronavirus (nCoV), which later

came to be known as COVID-19. The clinical name for this disease is

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

People affected developed symptoms, including respiratory problems

and fever.

The virus spreads quickly through respiratory droplets of

infected people or through handshakes, among other possible ways.

On 11 March 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic; and

as of May 2022, there were more than 520 million confirmed cases

across 220 countries with 6.27 million deaths (https://covid19.who.

int/). Some of the worst affected nations included USA, Spain, Italy,

Brazil, France, Russia, India and China. The phase of acute shortage of

vaccines is over, however there is still a shortage of supply, and con-

trolling the spread is vital to coping with the existing healthcare infra-

structure. Specifically, in India, the government undertook various

initiatives to curb the spread of the virus (Kaushal & Dogra, 2020).

Still, there were more than 43 million confirmed cases, and about

524,000 deaths reported as of 19 May 2021 (https://www.mohfw.

gov.in/). As per the Lancet's COVID-19 Commission report of April

2021, the situation become much worse in the second wave, and by

the start of June-2021, India was forecasted to witness over 2300

deaths per day.

Since the time that it was declared a pandemic, countries have

been trying their best to find a cure. In the absence of which, the gen-

eral modus operandi was containing the spread of the virus through

complete nationwide lockdowns, social distancing, and personal

hygiene (washing hands) (Tuncer, 2020). The economic cost of the

lockdowns has been enormous, estimated to be 7.2 trillion USD in

USA alone (Thunstrom et al., 2020). Soon enough there were vaccines

that were available in record time, but there were plaguing issues in

terms of their efficiency and availability, and the time needed to build

antibodies, among others. Therefore, one of the most important

aspects to reduce the spread of the virus was to test individuals, given

the significant occurrence of asymptomatic but highly contagious indi-

viduals in the localities. Massive testing was necessary to provide

medical treatment to COVID-19 patients (Manrai & Mandl, 2020).

Furthermore, the governments decided that mass testing would allow

virus-free people to work; the rationale behind the same was to re-

start the economy, while ensuring that there was no danger of bring-

ing on a fourth or fifth wave of the virus. However, the number of

test-kits needed fell woefully short; mass testing was becoming diffi-

cult both in developed and developing countries too (Gollier &

Received: 13 August 2020 Revised: 24 May 2022 Accepted: 6 June 2022

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2827

J Public Affairs. 2023;23:e2827. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1of11

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2827