By Jenna Sanchez
April 19, 2021
For what feels like the millionth time, I just finished my COVID test on campus as a student-athlete.
At first, I didn’t want to do the COVID saliva testing. Edgewood athletes I know were concerned about false positives and that caused a lot of stress. A false positive could put us out of our sport for two weeks, and that’s significant when you’re earning a spot on the team.
I’ve gotten used to it now, but on-campus testing was confusing at first. For instance, for a couple weeks we had to be tested on-campus, and at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison.
The major difference is the mode of testing. The Alliant Energy Center does nose swab tests and Edgewood provides saliva tests. The safety of the saliva testing at Edgewood was a concern for me because though we are spread out during testing, there are still multiple students testing in one or two rooms.
We are sharing the same air, touching the same tables after a test is done, and touching the same bag to turn in our tests. I and my teammates questioned many of these practices.
We are also concerned about tests deemed inconclusive. Those could put athletes out of their sport for an uncertain time until the athlete receives a negative test result.
Inconclusive results can be traced to many reasons.
For instance, experts say eating or drinking anything prior to testing could result in an inconclusive finding. Another common reason for rejected results is too much saliva, a fact that the athletes I know weren’t always notified about after turning in their samples.
Edgewood makes it easy for us by giving us access to the tests. The college still makes appointments for us specific days and individual time slots. But the uncertainty about test results create anxiety and concern.
As the COVID testing process evolved, I was relieved to find statistics from Heathline, a fact-checked medical information website, that gave me confidence that saliva testing works as well as nose swab testing.
“Saliva-based testing has shown accuracy in detecting positive coronavirus infection 83% of the time,” said Healthline on Jan 20. “Saliva-based testing has shown 99% accuracy at identifying negative cases for COVID.”
This mode of testing was, at first, questionable, but has come to be an easy and non-invasive mode of testing that I now prefer to do rather than nasal swabs.
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