The testing will initially be conducted for people under 18 in public coronavirus testing centers. When arriving to testing, the child can choose between giving a regular test from the nasal cavity or by using a mouth rinsing liquid.

The laboratory process will not change, the rinsing liquid will be used to determine the RNA of the novel coronavirus, the same as with the regular PCR method.

So the rinsing test would be collected in the necessary way, the test can only be taken with guidance from a medic on the testing site. The patient will get 10 ml of a physiological saline, which needs to be gargled. The medic will then take a sample from the cup after the patient spits the saline out and and it will be put into a vaccume cup, which will be marked with patient data. After this process, the test will be sent to a lab for testing on the regular PCR basis.

Karin Kallikorm, head of SYNLAB's Estonian services, said: "We offer the new service for people up to the age of 18, in order to make testing more pleasant for children and young people. It is important to emphasize that children cannot give the rinsing liquid test in border checkpoints, because the procedure takes a while longer and in border points, where testing is conducted in a living queue, it would delay everyone's waiting time," Kallikorm said.

She recommends parents to go through the gargling process with their children before going to testing with their child.

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