During the course of the pandemic, a number of laboratories have experienced shortages of one or more tests, consumables, or reagents necessary for SARS-CoV-2 testing. According to a survey, these shortages have limited testing in many laboratories to only about 43% of their maximum capacity, on average. This reduction in capacity has impacted the ability of hospitals and labs to perform tests in accordance with IDSA guidelines regarding the repetition of initially negative tests for those patients with high clinical suspicion of COVID-19. Due to reagent shortages for SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection, many labs have considered pooling specimens for testing.

Pooling of samples is one way to mitigate COVID-19 diagnosis Only effective when • Low community prevalence/ Low community positivity rate In case of high community prevalence, every pool will have positive specimens. It will be then necessary to check each specimen to find out which one it is. The time and resources spent on it will not favor the savings. • Loss of sensitivity must not be very good In case of high loss of sensitivity, there will be high false negatives. This will leave bad impact on patient care.