#Stayathome If You Have a Cold: High SARS-CoV-2 Salivary Viral Loads in Pediatric Patients with Nasopharyngeal Symptoms

Abstract

The choice of the best SARS-CoV-2 detection approach is crucial to predict which children with SARS-CoV-2 are at high risk of spreading the virus in order to manage public health measures and policies. In this prospective observational study of 35 children admitted to the Pediatric Emergency Departments of two tertiary hospitals in Northern Italy who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 by standard RT-PCR in nasopharyngeal swab (NPS), we evaluated their presenting symptoms according to their salivary viral load (SVL) determined by droplet digital PCR (ddPCR). Despite an overall low concordance between SARS-CoV-2 detected by salivary ddPCR and NPS RT-PCR (54.3%), when only patients with nasopharyngeal symptoms were analyzed, the sensitivity of ddPCR in saliva specimens increased to 71.4%, and over half of these patients had high SVL (>105 copies/mL), which was significantly more frequent than in children without nasopharyngeal symptoms (57.1% vs. 14.3%, OR = 8, CI 95% 1.28–50.03, p = 0.03). All asymptomatic children had low SVL values. Our findings support the hypothesis that children with nasopharyngeal symptoms are at higher risk of spreading SARS-CoV-2 due to their high SVL and, conversely, asymptomatic children are unlikely to spread the virus due to their low SVL, regardless of their NPS positivity.

Keywords

• viral load
• saliva
• SARS-CoV-2
• COVID-19
• rhinitis
• pharyngodynia