Coronavirus Saliva Test Results Promising: Yale Study

NEW HAVEN, CT — A new study by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health found that a saliva coronavirus test could be preferable to the current gold standard nasal swab.

The study was conducted at Yale New Haven Hospital with 44 inpatient and 98 health care workers. It found that saliva samples had a greater detection sensitivity and consistency than the traditional nasal swab approach.

“Taken together, our findings demonstrate that saliva is a viable and more sensitive alternative to nasopharyngeal swabs and could enable at-home self-administered sample collection for accurate large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing,” said study first author Anne Wyllie in a statement.

Two health care workers that tested negative for the virus with nasal swabs tested positive with the saliva test.

The study was recently published and hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. The authors of the study hope that similar studies are done to validate their results.

Saliva tests have many benefits over the nasal swab. It is less-intrusive and can be self-administered, which would help cut down on the amount of personal protective equipment used by health care workers who administer coronavirus tests.

“Once tests and laboratories are validated for using saliva, this could be rapidly implemented and immediately resolve many of the resource and safety issues with SARS-CoV-2 testing,” said YPH Assistant Professor Nathan Grubaugh, one of the senior writers of the study.

Saliva tests are one of a few possible compliments to the nasal drive-thru test centers that have dominated testing in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration approved an emergency use authorization for an at-home nasal test. The patient self-swabs a nasal sample and mails the sample to LabCorp for testing. The company hopes to make the tests available in most states to patients with a doctor’s order in the coming weeks.

Connecticut in partnership with CVS Health opened a rapid testing center on Sargent Drive in New Haven. There is no cost and a doctor’s order isn’t needed. Patients can pre-register for a test slot on CVS’s website.

Quest Diagnostics CEO Steve Rusckowski announced last week that the company will be able to process about 200,000 daily coronavirus antibody tests nationally starting in mid-May. The antibody test is a blood test and looks for signs that a person was previously infected with the virus.