All Times EDT
Keywords: diagnostic devices, public health, coronavirus
Traditionally, the evaluation of a medical test (as with nearly all medical products) is solely concerned with its effect on the wellbeing of the individual patient. In the case of an infectious disease, the benefits of an accurate result and the risks of a false result are extended to the larger community. This roundtable will discuss issues related to developing strategies for testing in the context of a widespread communicable disease. We will consider questions relating to time to diagnosis, testing of pooled samples, and tradeoffs between accuracy and convenience among other factors. We will discuss how testing fits into a larger public health strategy and how statisticians can contribute to the pandemic response.