After over a year ending with hundreds of thousands of deaths, masks as a daily mandate, nasal swab testing, social distancing, and lockdowns, now, as first reported by The Washington Post, China has introduced anal swab COVID-19 tests.
Understandably, people are upset, even though some Chinese physicians say the science backs up the claims. Many patients who’ve recovered from coronavirus report that nasal and throat swab tests aren’t able to detect the virus, but positive tests are possible using samples from the lower digestive tract.
Doctors in China say the new test isn’t meant for widespread use, but only specific cases of some patients.
“If we add anal swab testing, it can raise our rate of identifying infected patients,” Li Tongzeng, an infectious-disease specialist at Beijing You’an Hospital, said on state-run broadcaster CCTV on Sunday. “But of course, considering that collecting anal swabs is not as convenient as throat swabs, at the moment only key groups such as those in quarantine receive both.”
The research comes from a study published in the Future Microbiology journal in August, according to The Post’s reporting.
“Intriguingly, SARS-CoV-2 detection was positive in the anal swab of two patients and negative in throat swab and sputum samples,” they wrote. “We propose anal swabs as the potentially optimal specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection for evaluation of hospital discharge of covid-19 patients.”