LEXINGTON, Ky. ⁠— As the economy cautiously reopens, testing for COVID-19 has never been more important.

Pool testing, a method dating back 80 years, is one quick, cost-effective and underutilized strategy employers can use for mass medical testing as they welcome back employees.

"So, say for example, you have a business that has 300 employees. They're asymptomatic. We know probably less than 1% are going to have it because you've screened them. They don't have a fever or any other symptoms, but you want to make sure no one has it because if those 300 come into your factory, then they all could have it in a week," explained Dr. Matt Dawson, emergency physician and founder/CEO of Wild Health in Lexington. "So, you swab 300 individuals, but you break them up into pools of 10. So, say you take 10 swabs from 10 individuals. You put that into one tube, and then you do 30 tests, if 1% have it, that's going to be three of the tubes that are going to test positive."

Rooted in science and mathematics, pool testing decreases the risk of even one person with coronavirus entering an event site to as low as 0.027% in a group of 10,000 people.

"This is only useful in the situation we're talking about, kind of going back to work, screening large groups. You could even screen a couple thousand with this," said Dawson. "The math works for even bigger groups, but what we're talking about right now is the medium range, several hundred."

Dawson sees pool testing as a win-win for employers looking for peace of mind that their employees are safe.

"We have to open up at some point, but we have to do it safely. So, if we don't have testing, it's going to be much harder to do it safely," said Dawson. "And when we're screening asymptomatic people in low prevalence, this is a great solution for that."