A pool of four positives, for every actual positive you mix in.
If only the test were sensitive enough to be cut by ten or a hundredfold, we could really get some panic and emergency powers.
This makes RTW protocols cheaper and promotes reopening, it isn’t a tool of the panicmongers. So this makes a lot of sense actually. It’s a much cheaper way of testing when you are doing routine testing for populations in a hospital or school or nursing home or whatever.
You don’t record 4 positives, you go back and re-test the 4 people or whatever in the pool individually. Bc most pools won’t have even 1 positive, you save a lot of money on test processing.