Limited Print and Electronic Distribution RightsThis document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
Testing is an important part of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Availability of testing is a bottleneck due to constrained resources and effective prioritization of individuals is necessary. Here, we discuss the impact of different prioritization policies on COVID-19 patient discovery and the ability of governments and health organizations to use the results for effective decision making. We suggest a framework for testing that balances maximal discovery of positive individuals with the need for population-based surveillance aimed at understanding disease spread and characteristics. This framework draws from similar approaches to prioritization in the domain of cyber-security based on ranking individuals using a risk score and then reserving a portion of the capacity for random sampling. This approach is an application of Multi-Armed-Bandits maximizing exploration/exploitation of the underlying distribution. We find that individuals can be ranked for effective testing using a few simple features, and that ranking them using such models we can capture 65% (CI: 64.7%-68.3%) of the positive individuals using less than 20% of the testing capacity or 92.1% (CI: 91.1%-93.2%) of positives individuals using 70% of the capacity, allowing reserving a significant portion of the tests for population studies. Our approach allows experts and decision makers to tailor the resulting policies as needed allowing transparency into the ranking policy and the ability to understand the disease spread in the population and react quickly and in an informed manner.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.