Saliva sample pooling for the detection of SARS-CoV-2

Abstract
As the battle against coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic continues, an increase in workload and medical expenses have been a concern to the health care system worldwide. Developing a measure that helps to conserve the health care resource is, therefore, highly desirable, and the pooling of the specimens for testing is one of the attractive strategies. Recently, we showed that saliva could be a potential alternative specimen for the detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). In the present study, we performed the pooling of saliva specimens for testing by SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR. We showed that the saliva pool of either 5 or 10 samples, by allowing the detection of either gene in the pool at an increased cycle threshold cutoff value, further performing individual sample testing in the positive pools did not compromise the detection of SARS-CoV-2.
Keywords: COVID-19; RT-PCR; SARS-CoV-2; pooling; saliva.