KIGALI, Rwanda – Like many countries, Rwanda digs it up to control all its citizens in search of coronavirus due to the shortage of sources. But researchers have created a technique that attracts attention beyond the African continent.
They use a set of rules to fine-tune the organization’s verification process, which verifies batches of samples of people’s equipment and then checks the user separately only if a safe batch tests positive for COVID-19. Grouped checks retain infrequent check materials.
According to the researchers, Rwanda’s mathematical technique makes this procedure more efficient. This is a credit for emerging countries with limited resources, where other people have to wait several days for results. Longer expectations mean a greater chance of spreading the virus without knowing it.
The authors of the rule set expressed some pride that a possible solution to a persistent challenge to the global crisis came from Africa. Experts have noticed. Sema Sgaier, an assistant professor of global aptitude at Harvard, called Rwanda’s technique an example of the “incredible responses in very low resource contexts” that have emerged from the continent.
Some experts, and even researchers, have expressed fear that the complexity of the technique may discourage its widespread use. “If you said that to a technician, they’d say, “What a waste. I need an undeniable scheme,” said Sigrun Smola, molecular virologist at Saarland University Medical Center in Germany, in a recent article on Rwanda and other techniques for group testing.
Evolved through Wilfred Ndifon, a mathematical epidemiologist and director of studies at the Global Network of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, is being remodeled into software that will advise lab technicians, minimizing human error.
“The technician will continue to do the general lab work,” Ndifon told The Associated Press. The software will “facilitate the calculations”. It will tell the lab technician how many samples to collect and, in the end, how many samples are infected.
The technique is of maximum effectiveness in places where the prevalence of the virus is low, according to the researchers.
“The rule set itself is new,” Ndifon said. This reduces the number of new tests required when an organizational pattern is positive. Instead of retesting the batch pattern individually, the mathematical formula dictates how to create and overlay smaller computers in the batch to allow the identity of positive patterns.
He described it as organizing samples in a multidimensional design, such as a dice or hyperscript, and along the cuts.
“In terms of visual representation, it’s pretty beautiful,” he says.
The novelty of the moment is speed. Each verification run takes about 3 hours, Ndifon said, and this technique requires two rounds.
Investigators said they were going to locate a positive pattern in an organization of 100. They found that the failure rate is 0.001%, “effectively zero,” Ndifon said.
Rwanda has one of the lowest instances of virus in Africa with more than 2,100 infections, and the World Health Organization has named the country as one of the countries that has responded to the pandemic. The Rwandan government gave citizens credit for cooperating with government directives.
The East African country has carried out more than 300,000 checks to detect the virus. Each check costs about $50, Ndifon said, but saves more than a portion of that money.
“The use of technological responses has contributed to the strain on our fitness system,” said Sabin Nsanzimana, an epidemiologist at the Rwandan management organization that opposes COVID-19.
Now, other African countries, adding South Africa, will use this approach, according to the researchers.
Leon Mutesa, a Rwandan professor of human genetics and a member of the government’s COVID-19 task force, is one of the experts supervising the implementation of the new approach.
He said he gave hope and confidence to the health of Rwanda, which had watched with horror the photographs of the pandemic spreading across Europe.
“It’s faster and saves money. So we had to control a lot of people,” he said.