ArticlePLoS biology2021
Strategic testing approaches for targeted disease monitoring can be used to inform pandemic decision-making.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Surveillance Analysis and Sample Size Explorer (SASSE): Learning How to Plan Disease Surveillance in Wildlife.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Comparative Analysis of RT-PCR and a Colloidal Gold Immunochromatographic Assay for SARS-CoV-2 Detection.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Operational analysis for COVID-19 testing: Determining the risk from asymptomatic infections.PloS one · 2023Article
- Optimal allocation of PCR tests to minimise disease transmission through contact tracing and quarantine.Epidemics · 2021Article
- A novel benchmark for COVID-19 pandemic testing effectiveness enables the accurate prediction of new Intensive Care Unit admissions.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Synergistic interventions to control COVID-19: Mass testing and isolation mitigates reliance on distancing.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
More than 1.6 million Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) tests were administered daily in the United States at the peak of the epidemic, with a significant focus on individual treatment. Here, we show that objective-driven, strategic sampling designs and analyses can maximize information gain at the population level, which is necessary to increase situational awareness and predict, prepare for, and respond to a pandemic, while also continuing to inform individual treatment. By focusing on specific objectives such as individual treatment or disease prediction and control (e.g., via the collection of population-level statistics to inform lockdown measures or vaccine rollout) and drawing from the literature on capture-recapture methods to deal with nonrandom sampling and testing errors, we illustrate how public health objectives can be achieved even with limited test availability when testing programs are designed a priori to meet those objectives.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.