Extensive Saliva based COVID-19 testing – the way forward to curtail the global pandemic?
Amit Varma, Muneer Abubaker, Ismail Dergaa
Abstract
With over 36 million people infected with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, testing has been most challenging process to identify and isolate individuals who are COVID-positive. The RT-PCR testing method has been the gold standard testing tool with a sensitivity and specificity of 95.2% and 98.9% respectively. However, this comes at a huge cost of the stress and anxieties of the testing process itself, especially for children as well as the requirements of health care professionals with PPE kits and the dangers of an aerosol generating procedure. We hence recommend the saliva testing kits as the suggested way forward to testing for the general population, especially for children, as they are highly sensitive and specific (98% and 91% respectively) as well as can be a much effortless process to test for COVID-19 and could certainly pave the way forward to mass testing as some countries are already planning to implement.