Filenews 8 January 2022
Experts stress that it is very likely that someone will have a nasal test and come out negative and then have an oropharyngeal test and be diagnosed positive. This is because Omikron often has symptoms that are localized in the larynx and not in the nose.
While the Omikron variant now dominates around the world, more and more are worried about whether a case can be detected with a self-test at home.
Experts stress that it is very likely that someone will have a nasal test and come out negative and then have an oropharyngeal test and be diagnosed positive. This is because Omikron often has symptoms that are localized in the larynx and not in the nose.
This is how the idea of a self test with a pharyngeal sample was born and not with a sample from the nose. In short, can it be a solution to collect a coating by placing the cotton swab of the kit on the neck and not on the nostril?
Many are the users on social media who claimed to have tried it at home and were surprised to see that while the nose test came out negative, when they tried to do a self test with the cotton swab in the throat they tested positive for the coronavirus.
Because symptoms seem to start earlier in people infected with Omikron, there is a possibility that the virus does not yet develop in the nose when you do the first test," tweeted epidemiologist and test specialist Michael Mina, a staunch supporter of rapid testing, as published by the ertnews.gr, "who recently left his academic and research positions at Harvard and is now a chief scientist for the biotechnology software company eMed.
"The virus can start below," he continued. "The neck swab + nasal can improve the chances of the virus sticking to the cotton swab."
Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow in the Federation of American Scientists, agreed. "Omikron is very different from all the other variants," he tweeted. "We need to adapt to changing testing strategies."
However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) strongly discourages deviation from the specific guidelines that come with the test kits.
According to the washingtonpost.com, the Agency "has expressed its concerns for the safety of citizens during the self-collection of neck smears, as they are more complex than nasal swabs – and if used incorrectly, they can cause harm to the patient".
Other epidemiologists repeated the FDA's warning and said the guidelines for testing should not be changed until there is more data. "There's a lot of work that needs to be done in order to turn to a new sampling method," said Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.
While agreeing that adding the cotton swab to the neck "has some reasoning," Yuka Manabe, who runs the Center for Innovative Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University, stressed that "it's not the way the tests were designed to be used."
Source: in.gr
