guwahati assam health department will test 150 randomly selected persons for novel coronavirus in three areas of dhubri district by pooled samples method on sunday as it realigns its focus on the district which has been reporting covid19 positive cases over longer intervals of timethe district which shares borders with west bengal meghalaya and bangladesh has so far reported five positive cases and all of them are either tablighi jamaat attendee or their primary or secondary contacts the first positive case was reported on april 7 and the second case came two days later but the third and fourth cases was reported after four and five days respectively the last positive case was reported after an interval of nine days on thursdayhealth minister himanta biswa sarma said we will conduct sudden and random pooling five samples for realtime rtpcr screening for covid19 tests in dhubri district on sundaythough golaghat and morigaon reported nine and six cases respectively these cases were detected within a day or two but though dhubri has reported five cases these are emerging in different timeframes therefore we are going to test swabs of 150 people randomly at dhubri chapar and bilasipara on sunday he addedhe clarified that the random tests will not be a rapid testing but based on swabs collection the swabs from dhurbi will be tested at fakhruddin ali ahmed medical college and hospital barpeta he saidpooled samples for molecular testing of covid19 is done to increase the numbers of tests conducted by laboratories a pooled testing algorithm involves the pcr screening of a specimen pool comprising multiple individual patient specimens followed by individual testing pool deconvolution only if a pool screens positive as all individual samples in a negative pool are regarded as negative it results in substantial cost savings when a large proportion of pools tests negative