Top USC coronavirus officials strike positive tone in COVID case numbers, testing

Despite a recent surge of cases, top University of South Carolina officials are not yet ringing the alarm bells, they said at a Tuesday press conference.

One of the major reasons why: saliva testing, said College of Pharmacy Dean Stephen Cutler and Arnold School of Public Health epidemiologist Melissa Nolan.

“It’s part of just a package of what we’re able to provide...it’s just one in a series of items in our toolbox,” Nolan said during the press conference. “Most of those items are working very well.”

Cutler agreed, saying the saliva testing — something other shuttered college campuses such as University of North Carolina and North Carolina State did not have — was a “game changer.”

While the original COVID 19 tests, the nasopharyngeal swab, took several days to return test results and were widely considered to be very uncomfortable, saliva testing can return results in hours and is no more uncomfortable than spitting in a cup.

Quick test results allow those with confirmed cases to more quickly quarantine and enables health officials to trace people who have come in contact with the infected person.

USC ran clinical tests comparing the nasopharyngeal swab to the saliva test and found the saliva tests were every bit as effective as the swab test, Cutler said.

USC, which uses robots to speed up saliva testing, has been able to conduct 1,200 saliva tests in a single day, but Cutler said the “sweet spot” is no more than 1,000 tests per day.

As a result of that increased testing, Cutler said USC is finding more positive cases than other colleges that have already switched to online-only classes because of COVID 19.

As of Aug. 27, the most recent date available, coronavirus cases have exceeded 1,000 at USC, the school’s website shows. That prompted the school to recently update its alert level from “new normal” to “low.” The alert levels go up to “moderate” and “high,” but USC has not reached those levels before.

“We knew going into this, being proactive in the testing... we were going to see more positives than those institutions that are not testing like we are,” Cutler said. “So we’re not really surprised by the number.”