Saliva or Nasopharyngeal Swab Specimens for Detection of SARS-CoV-2

Authors: Anne L. Wyllie, John Fournier, Arnau Casanovas‐Massana, Melissa Campbell, Maria Tokuyama, Pavithra Vijayakumar, Joshua L. Warren, Bertie Geng, M. Catherine Muenker, Adam J. Moore, Chantal B. F. Vogels, Mary E. Petrone, Isabel M. Ott, Peiwen Lu, Arvind Venkataraman, Alice Lu-Culligan, Jon Klein, Rebecca Earnest, Michael Simonov, Rupak Datta, Ryan Handoko, Nida Naushad, Lorenzo R. Sewanan, Jordan Valdez, Elizabeth B. White, Sarah Lapidus, Chaney C. Kalinich, Xiaodong Jiang, Daniel J. Kim, Eriko Kudo, Melissa Linehan, Tianyang Mao, Miyu Moriyama, Ji Eun Oh, Annsea Park, Julio Silva, Eric Song, Takehiro Takahashi, Manabu Taura, Orr-El Weizman, Patrick Wong, Yexin Yang, Santos Bermejo, Camila D. Odio, Saad B. Omer, Charles S. Dela Cruz, Shelli Farhadian, Richard A. Martinello, Akiko Iwasaki, Nathan D. Grubaugh, Albert I. Ko - New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM 2020 cited by 1,049

In this letter, the investigators report that saliva specimens and nasopharyngeal swab specimens had similar sensitivity in the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in both symptomatic and asymptomatic persons.