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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: 2, Offtopic) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 29 2021, @01:41AM (2 children)
As you get older, you see these kinds of things more and more. For older men, there's that thrilling prostate check. Women get to experience the pap smear, and several other checks that involve probes of intimate places. For all, it's plenty humiliating and degrading to have to move into a nursing home, because you have become too feeble to use a toilet without assistance. Can't sit down or stand up without help. Can't even wipe yourself. Compared to that, an anal swab is nothing.
Then there's the stuff we do to cows. Again, a mere anal swab is real mild in comparison. I'm talking about artificial insemination. The control we exert over cows' lives is incredible. Milk them, put them on whatever diet we wish, slaughter and eat them, turn their hides into leather, breed them, or castrate them, cut their horns off, all as we desire. I also have a few tales from the farm about this.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @03:10AM
It's basically Cowshwitz.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Friday January 29 2021, @03:37AM
Now that I am that age... I am very grateful that you can now scrape your poop into a box instead of having a colonoscopy.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P