The Israeli Health Ministry has authorized a new COVID-19 testing technique that allows labs to simultaneously evaluate nose and throat swabs taken from eight people, helping them save reagents necessary for the process, which are in short supply all over the world.
The Israeli government plans to roll out the new method in 12 labs across the country by October, anticipating that another wave of coronavirus infections could coincide with influenza season with potentially calamitous results.
“We’re doing everything we can in order to be ready,” said Ronen Walfisch, an engineer at the defence ministry who oversaw a pilot project to test the method’s efficacy. The method passed with flying colours, he said.
The standard RT-PCR test takes several hours to be processed. This, combined with the time taken to collect and transport samples, means the result may sometimes take over a day to come. But pool testing has come to be a preferred method in low-prevalence areas for its efficacy.
If a pool tests negative, then the need for conducting separate tests again is eliminated. However, if the pool tests positive, it means that one of the samples is Covid-19 positive. Further tests are then conducted to determine which patient is positive.
In a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances, Shental and his colleagues, Tomer Hertz and Angel Porgador of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, report that their method — called P-Best, for Pooling-Based Efficient SARS-CoV-2 Testing — successfully detected positives in pools of as many as 48 samples. The method accurately screened 1,115 health care workers with just 144 tests, the study found.
