High-frequency screening combined with diagnostic testing for control of SARS-CoV-2 in high-density settings: an economic evaluation of resources allocation for public health benefit

SARS-CoV-2 spreads quickly in dense populations, with serious implications for universities, workplaces, and other settings where exposure reduction practices are difficult to implement. Rapid screening has been proposed as a tool to slow the spread of the virus; however, many commonly used diagnostic tests (e.g., RT-qPCR) are expensive, difficult to deploy (e.g., require a nasopharyngeal specimen), and have extended turn-around times. We evaluated testing regimes that combined diagnostic testing using qPCR with high-frequency screening using a novel reverse-transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP, herein LAMP) assay. We used a compartmental susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model to simulate screening of a university population. We also developed a Shiny application to allow administrators and public health professionals to develop optimal testing strategies given site-specific assumptions about testing investment, target population, and cost. The frequency of screening, especially when pooling samples, was more important for minimizing epidemic size than test sensitivity, behavioral compliance, contact tracing capacity, and time between testing and results. Our results suggest that when testing budgets are limited, it is safer and more cost-effective to allocate the majority of funds to screening. Rapid, cost-effective, and scalable screening tests, like LAMP, should be viewed as critical components of SARS-CoV-2 testing in high-density populations.