Private company to conduct saliva testing
‘‘Saliva testing can play a role in surveillance testing.’’ Dr Ashley Bloomfield
Director-general of Health
The Ministry of Health plans to ramp up surveillance testing for Covid-19 by hiring a private company to swab the saliva of border workers.
Director-general of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield yesterday said the ministry wanted to use saliva tests for asymptomatic surveillance testing of border workers, likely swabbing twice a week on top of the routine use of nasal swabs.
Saliva testing for Covid-19 has yet to be substantially adopted in New Zealand, despite its use in countries like Australia and the United States.
A Government-appointed review in September said ‘‘saliva testing as a complementary methodology should be introduced as soon as possible’’, and the ministry was in the early stages of a trial by February.
Bloomfield previously expressed some scepticism about the Us-developed tested being used by local firms, saying the ministry wanted to be sure the tests would be accurate in the New Zealand setting, where there was little Covid-19 virus and possibly a greater risk of false negatives.
A shift in approach came yesterday when Bloomfield said the ministry – while continuing to trial its own saliva tests – would look to enter an arrangement with a private company to run testing of border workers.
‘‘Saliva testing can play a role in surveillance testing, in other words the asymptomatic routine testing we are doing of our border workforce in particular,’’ he said at news conference.
‘‘We are doing the trial and in our quarantine facilities, but also working with two or three private providers who have established saliva testing ... and we’re planning to see if we can go into an arrangement with them to look at using this as a complementary testing method in our border workforce.’’
He said using a private company would therefore avoid cutting into the Government’s existing capacity for running polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests. The ministry already used private providers to process 40 per cent of its nasal swabs.
‘‘If we can get to an arrangement with a private provider ... we don’t disrupt or compromise any of our current testing capacity ...’’