Cooperation under Pressure: Lessons from the COVID-19 Swab Crisis

Summary: This study models the relationship between the clinical sensitivity of different testing methods and their limit of detection (LoD), showing that a 10-fold increase in LoD will decrease the sensitivity of the method by approximately 13%. Therefore, the LoD of the testing method significantly impacts the clinical performance of SARS-CoV-2 tests, with methods having the highest LoDs potentially missing the majority of infected patients.