Merton DPhil students awarded grant for work on COVID-19 testing strategy

Three Merton DPhil students are part of a team working to develop an efficient testing strategy that could be used to contain COVID-19 in developing countries. The team, whose advisors include another Mertonian, Bodley Fellow and Lecturer in Physics Professor Christopher Ramsey, have now been awarded a research grant which will fund a project to trial the strategy in Mexico.

The problem that the team set out to tackle is the lack of availability of virus testing resources in low- to middle-income countries. Rather than focus on the number of tests which would be required for individual testing, they are seeking instead to get the most out of what is available: to do this they have developed a group testing model that draws on a method that has been successfully used to fight HIV.

This segments the population according to an individual’s exposure to others (and consequently to the virus), and their "cost of containment" - either social cost, e.g. a healthcare worker who by self-isolating is unable to perform essential duties; or financial cost, which is prohibitive for many. Group sizes and allocation of testing resources are then determined, and those groups who return a positive test effectively contained. This serves to help policymakers optimise the balance between virus containment and socioeconomic welfare.

The team have submitted a paper to Arxiv and have been presenting their work at the Global Challenges in Economics and Computation (GCEC'20) and AI for Social Good workshops. They have also made a website,  www.testandcontain.com and a short video to explain and promote their work.

Thanks to the research grant awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Economics and Computation and funded by Facebook, the team are now able to start a project with collaborators in Mexico to apply their strategy in disadvantaged communities in the state of San Luis Potosí.

Commenting on the award, Merton Computer Science graduate Edwin Lock, who is part of the team said:

“We are delighted to be awarded the GCEC’20 grant, as it will help us continue our work to reduce the impact of COVID-19 in low- to middle-income countries.

“The funding will allow us to expand our team and lay the groundwork for implementing our resource-efficient COVID-19 testing and containment mechanism in Mexico, with the end goal of protecting the health and livelihoods of those that have been hardest hit by the pandemic.”

As well as Edwin and Professor Ramsey, the team also includes Mertonians Jakob Jonnerby (DPhil Physics) and Divya Sridhar (DPhil Zoology), alongside Dr Francisco Marmolejo-Cossío, a Career Development Fellow at Balliol, Magdalen Computer Science graduate Ninad Rajgopal, and Philip Lazos, a Postdoc at Sapienza Rome and former Oxford DPhil.