pooling reads for error correction

[ilya]

For error-correction of Illumina reads, is it a good idea to pool reads from several samples and do error correction on the pool, rather than individually? (The samples are from patients with the mumps virus.) The intuition is that reads in region of low coverage might look like errors when seen in isolation, but would be confirmed by similar reads from other samples.

Are there error correction tools that explicitly take several samples, and give more credence to kmers/substrings seen in several samples?