Pooling of Nasopharyngeal Swab Samples To Overcome a Global Shortage of Real-Time Reverse Transcription-PCR COVID-19 Test Kits

The global outbreak and rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has created an urgent need for large-scale testing of populations. There is a demand for high-throughput testing protocols that can be used for efficient and rapid testing of clinical specimens. We evaluated a pooled PCR protocol for testing nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs using known positive/negative and untested clinical samples that were assigned to pools of 5 or 10.