Contact Tracing Enhances the Efficiency of COVID-19 Group Testing

Group testing can save testing resources in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In group testing, we are given n samples, one per individual, and arrange them into m < n pooled samples, where each pool is obtained by mixing a subset of the n individual samples. Infected individuals are then identified using a group testing algorithm. In this paper, we use side information (SI) collected from contact tracing (CT) within non-adaptive/single-stage group testing algorithms. We generate data by incorporating CT SI and characteristics of disease spread between individuals. These data are fed into two signal and measurement models for group testing, where numerical results show that our algorithms provide improved sensitivity and specificity. While Nikolopoulos et al. utilized family structure to improve non-adaptive group testing, ours is the first work to explore and demonstrate how CT SI can further improve group testing performance.