Viral Load Analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus in Nose Versus Mouth Sites

It is a single-center, non-profit experimental study, intended to evaluate the viral load of SARS COV 2 in nasal and oral samples of positive subjects to evaluate any variation and understand which is the most suitable site for carrying out the swab.

Experimental study on de-identified, biological samples (nasal and buccal swab). The study will be performed on patients admitted to IRCCS Sacro Cuore Don Calabria Hospital or health care workers or their family members, who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 by either a molecular or antigen test, performed on nasopharyngeal swab, according to current diagnostics. Among the family members, also children \>4 years old will be included. The reason for including children and young subjects is based on data indicating that they seems to be highly sensitive to Omicron infection and that their vaccination status could influence viral load. The nose and mouth swab are poor invasive and they could be well tolerated also by children. Whinin 7 days from diagnosis, the subjects will be requested to sample another two specimens i.e. nasal swab and mouth swab, that will be tested for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Results, expressed as cycle threshold will be then compared to analyze viral loads from the two different sites. Moreover, an aliquot will be retro-transcribed into cDNA and sequenced by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to obtain the virus entire genome sequence or evaluated by RT-PCR for variant determination.