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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 29 2021, @11:42AM (3 children)
"because people vote for lawmakers that fix them."
We should also insist on having better voter integrity laws than what we currently have. Otherwise it may not even matter who we would like to vote for.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 29 2021, @06:42PM (2 children)
i agree with this, but even if we fix the districts and nuke the ec, it doesn't fix it. many times people do vote to support bad things. hell, we put japansese americans in camps. just that the war on drugs and corrupt cops aren't examples of that. and many bad things caused by voters are because of blatant misinformation and lies. like the post i replied to. the guy complaining about the problem -literally the cause of the problem. and too stupid to know it. he also doesn't really care about the problem -it's just a quest he picked to fill a hole in his life. because he's a loser.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 30 2021, @12:20AM (1 child)
Why don't you tell me your home address, and we can talk about how much of a loser I am in person.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday January 30 2021, @12:34AM
Yep. In addition to not having the social skills and conversational experience to understand a basic joke, you are also a keyboard warrior and /r/iamverybadass. How about instead of posting my address on the internet, I just laugh at you some more, you absolute social reject loser?