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Large-scale surveillance for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the pathogen for coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) is an important strategy for preventing the second wave of the disease [1]. Group testing of pooled specimens to detect for SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to be an effective strategy to conserve resources and to substantially increase testing capacity [2, 3]. In order to reveal the importance of group testing for COVID-19, the FDA issued a statement on facilitating diagnostic test availability for asymptomatic testing and pool testing on June 16, 2020 [4]. To our knowledge, this is the first study to determine the cost effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2 sample pooling.

A total of 4,630 nasopharyngeal specimens were collected from both asymptomatic and symptomatic patients suspected to have COVID-19. Based on our proof-of-concept study [2], these specimens were randomly …