Salivary diagnostics in COVID-19: Future research implications

Coronavirus disease 19 or COVID-19 was first reported and confirmed in Wuhan, China in December 2019.1,2 Henceforth, it has rapidly spread to several countries, becoming a global pandemic, affecting 1,279,722 people world over and causing 72,614 deaths as on 7th April 2020, according to the reports of the WHO. 3 In this perspective, we briefly explain the possible role of saliva/salivary glands and gingival crevicular fluid, to investigate the novel Coronavirus 19 and we consider other ways in which such studies could be set in motion.COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) which was provisionally named as 2019-nCoV, belongs to the genus Betacoronavirus and is the third animal coronavirus infection to affect humans.4 The high pathogenic tendency of coronaviruses, to affect humans, were considered, only with the emergence of two life threatening epidemics, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2002e2003 in China and approximately ten years later MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in the Middle Eastern Countries.5 Both SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV) are considered to have their origin from bats.The genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to be 79.6%