TITLE:
SARS-CoV-2 Pooled Testing Methodology for PCR Testing Applied in Private Laboratory in Armenia
AUTHORS:
Inessa Nazaryan, Narek Pepanyan, Arshag Keshishyan, Susanna Petrosyan, Naira Margaryan, Shahane Mnatsakanyan
KEYWORDS:
COVID-19, Screening, Grouped Testing
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Infectious Diseases,
Vol.14 No.1,
January
26,
2024
ABSTRACT: Since the beginning of COVID-19 pandemics many countries were facing challenges with testing capacity recourse limitations. Throughout the waves of the pandemic countries were trying to address the existing constrains exploring solutions to increase the testing capacity with more cost-effective approaches. Pooled methodology was one of the methods which many have validated and used. It is evident that in case of pooled sample testing the sensitivity becomes lower, however the variation highly depends on the pool size as well as the incidence rate at the certain point. Armenia as well as many other countries has adopted regulations for mandatory COVID-19 PCR testing for all the travelers. Current study aimed to explore the efficiency of COVID-19 pooled PCR testing for nasopharyngeal swabs of individuals with no symptoms in a time period with good epidemiological state of the infection. Nasopharingeal swab samples from individuals were collected. The manual extraction of RNAs of samples was performed after pooling up to 5 samples. The pools with Cycle Threshold (CT) of