September 28, 2020

Mass Screening of Asymptomatic Persons for SARS-CoV-2 Using Saliva

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Testing and Treatment

Keywords (Tags): testing

• A study that conducted mass screening for SARS-CoV-2 among two cohorts of asymptomatic persons in Japan, a contact tracing cohort (n=161) and an airport quarantine cohort (n=1,763), reported the overall sensitivity of RT-PCR testing with nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs was 86% and saliva samples was 92%, with specificity for both samples >99.9%. Due to the lack of a “gold standard” a Bayesian latent class model was used to estimate the test parameters. The true concordance probability between the NP and saliva tests was estimated at 99.8% in a setting with a prevalence of 0.3%.

Yokota et al. (Sept 25, 2020). Mass Screening of Asymptomatic Persons for SARS-CoV-2 Using Saliva. Clinical Infectious Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa1388