Validation of a small-size pooling approach targeting hospital surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 infection

Recent studies describing the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in pools of 5 to 32 samples reported false negative rates up to 10% for large groups, suggesting that smaller sample pools are a good compromise to increase sample processing capacity while maintaining test reliability. Since 5-sample pools were shown to efficiently detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in RT-PCR assays, we chose to test and validate this approach using a highthroughput RNA extraction and amplification platform.