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Months-long lockdowns. Entire city populations herded through the streets for mandatory testing. The people of China could be forgiven for thinking they had seen it all during the coronavirus pandemic.
But now they face a new indignity: the addition of anal swabs — yes, you read that right — to the testing regimen for those in quarantine.
Chinese state media outlets introduced the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.
Yet for many, it seemed a step too far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding pandemic.
"Everyone involved will be so embarrassed," one user in Guangdong province said Wednesday on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll, 80 percent of respondents said they "could not accept" the invasive method.
[...] The new protocol comes just over a year after the virus began spreading rapidly in the country. Chinese officials are worried about the approach of Lunar New Year next month, often called the world's largest annual migration. Some 3 billion trips are made over the holiday during a non-pandemic year, which means even a single silent coronavirus case could rapidly leapfrog across the nation.
Journal Reference:
Mei Sun, Dong Guo, Jing Zhang, et al. Anal swab as a potentially optimal specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection to evaluate hospital discharge of COVID-19 patients [open], Future Microbiology (DOI: 10.2217/fmb-2020-0090)
(Score: 4, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday January 28 2021, @11:24PM (3 children)
All the Chinese government has to do to elicit compliance is to threaten to lower the social credit [wikipedia.org] score of the citizens who don't comply. Give someone a choice between having their rectum invaded once and their life ruined forever, and they'll quickly find the courage to drop their pants.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 29 2021, @12:57AM (2 children)
Maybe the US could elicit compliance by requiring regular testing to get stimulus checks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @01:12AM
Stimulus? Anal swabs and stimulus. Uh-huh . . .
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday January 29 2021, @03:39AM
All they need to do is release an easy 4-step smartphone app.
1) Insert phone
2) Wait for the beep
3) Remove phone
4) Results automatically posted to your social media