January 8, 2021

In today's episode we discuss: —Epidemiology: The authors present a case report of a 29-year-old SARS-CoV-2 positive woman with minimal, mild symptoms who underwent an uncomplicated and successful vaginal delivery to a healthy baby boy at the University of Missouri Women and Children’s Hospital in April 2020. After birth, the patient’s placenta was subsequently analyzed using hematoxylin-and-eosin (H&E) staining, which revealed evidence of general placental vascular malperfusion possibly due to hypertrophic arteriolopathy along with immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining which revealed the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in chorionic villi endothelial cells. Current literature on COVID-19 in pregnant patients is somewhat conflicting regarding morbidity, miscarriage rates, susceptibility, and the possibility of vertical transmission; the authors posit that this case is the first report of placental SARS-CoV-2 in the setting of mild COVID-19 disease, where the patient had only symptoms of mild myalgias. —R&D: Diagnosis & Treatments: A prospective study conducted at a Malaysian COVID-19 quarantine center of 217 asymptomatic adult males, where 160 tested positive, found a far greater SARS-CoV-2 detection rate using morning salivary samples (93.1%) when compared to nasopharyngeal swabs (52.5%) (p<0.001, 45.6% concordance, 47.5% discordance). These results suggest that the higher accuracy of salivary analysis could play a role in improved diagnostics, decreasing direct healthcare worker-patient interaction and risk of transmission, improving transport preservation, reducing test wait time, and allowing for self-collection.