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As COVID-19 continues to strain public health systems and vaccination programmes race against new variants that might be more transmissible or capable of evading immune responses, the urgent need for simple, accessible, and frequent testing remains. Inexpensive, scalable, and sustainable strategies that allow easily repeatable testing over time need to be made widely available. This is possible by testing saliva. The gold-standard sample for SARS-CoV-2 detection defaulted to the nasopharyngeal swab because of its role in detection of other upper respiratory tract pathogens. Demand for swabs drove a cascading collapse of supply chains and worsened shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) required by health-care workers for sample collection. As the need for mass testing and frequent, repeated sampling surged, the urgency for alternative sample types became apparent. Although not a …