Variability of Salivary and Nasal Specimens for SARS-CoV-2 Detection.

In a large cohort of ambulatory confirmed COVID-19 patients with multiple self-collected sample time points, we compared 202 matched nasal-oropharyngeal swabs and oral salivary fluid sample pairs by RT-PCR. Nasal-oropharyngeal swabs were more sensitive than this salivary sample type (oral crevicular fluid) suggesting that not all saliva sample types have equivalent sensitivity. However, all samples that were Vero E6-TMPRSS2 cell culture positive (e.g., infectious virus) were also oral fluid RT-PCR positive suggesting that oral fluid may find the patients most likely to transmit disease to others.

[1]  Elizabeth B White,et al.  Saliva or Nasopharyngeal Swab Specimens for Detection of SARS-CoV-2 , 2020, The New England journal of medicine.

[2]  K. To,et al.  COVID-19 salivary signature: diagnostic and research opportunities , 2020, Journal of Clinical Pathology.

[3]  K. To,et al.  Early-Morning vs Spot Posterior Oropharyngeal Saliva for Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Implication of Timing of Specimen Collection for Community-Wide Screening , 2020, Open forum infectious diseases.

[4]  Angelo Tagliabue,et al.  Saliva is a reliable tool to detect SARS-CoV-2 , 2020, Journal of Infection.

[5]  Kwok-Hung Chan,et al.  Consistent Detection of 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Saliva , 2020, Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.