School, Andreoni: “Good salivary test but keep a mask”

“That of using and extending salivary tests for back to school seems like a nice idea, they are easy to use even for parents and not invasive for younger children. They can be a good mass monitoring system” Covid- 19 “which will allow to have, if not a daily data, at least one weekly”. Massimo Andreoni, scientific director of the Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases (Simit) and head of Infectious Diseases at the Tor Vergata Polyclinic in Rome, underlines this to Adnkronos Health, commenting on a possible extension of salivary tests at school, even beyond the ‘sentinel’ institutes . The expert, however, reiterates that, as regards the behaviors to be respected in class, “the mask must be kept: it is still early to remove it in the classroom, even if all students are vaccinated and even if we do the screening – he warns – especially in this phase in which the Delta variant circulates “.

“This type of” salivary “screening will be able to give us the real impact of the epidemic on the school and also allow us to discover outbreaks and quota them quickly”, adds Andreoni. In terms of effectiveness, salivary tests “have a good efficacy – says the infectious disease specialist – Of course they are second level tests compared to the PCR swab which remains the reference one. They have a lower sensitivity, but they are the right tool to apply in health monitoring. of a population as large as the school population can be “.

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