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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, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday January 29 2021, @11:16AM
1) Nasal swabbing come with a risk of brain damage and/or brain infection. Proper technique requires that the swab is not pressed up against the roof of nasal cavity. Unfortunately, the swabbers are only human and you can't guarantee that they will use correct technique on everybody. Few people have their brains in their arses, even though their behaviour might lead you to think so.
Firstpost: COVID-19 nasopharyngeal swab: Correct sampling technique is important to prevent injuries and complications [firstpost.com]
2) As pointed out, positive PCR tests can be obtained from anal swabs after nasal swabs show negative. The oro-fecal route of infection is well known in other diseases (which is why hand-washing, food-hygiene, and not touching the area around your nose and mouth is so important). There is some debate over whether viable viruses are shed via the digestive system, but the PCR tests are detecting RNA with the same signature as viable viruses, so it makes sense to regard people showing positive test results from anal swabs as being potentially infective and dealing with them commensurately.