Throat swabs more reliable for early detection of Omicron? (Or a combination... see below)

[deurbano]

https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/throat-swab-rapid-testing-omicron-effective.html

Good Grief, We’re Doing Throat Swabs Now? The mouth method might be better at detecting omicron.
BY SHANNON PALUS DEC 30, 2021

Throat swabs, really? Yes, really.

Earlier this month, Jacklyn Grace Lacey tested herself for COVID-19 using a home kit. First, she did it the usual way, sticking the swab up her nose. It came back negative.

Instead of stopping there, Lacey, who works as a medical anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, “decided to biohack on myself.” The omicron variant was circulating quickly around New York City, and the literature suggested that the variant might replicate faster in the piping of one’s lungs, as opposed to one’s nasal cavity. So she did another test, sticking the swab down her throat. This time, the test yielded that telltale pink line.

Lacey, who had stocked up on rapid tests over the summer, took this as a clear sign she had COVID—but she kept swabbing via the traditional method out of curiosity. After 36 hours, Lacey finally got a positive result from a nasal swab, too. “I was pleased to learn my hypothesis was correct,” she told me via Twitter DM (she was still sick and not up for talking on the phone). But she was concerned about what her experiment might mean for others who were relying on tests to screen before holiday gatherings. She changed her name on Twitter to “Throat Swabs 4 Omicron ASAP.” Before long, she was retweeting someone else who got a positive with the same method....

...If you’re so inclined, you can swab your throat with a standard test kit by opening wide in front of a mirror and sticking the thing to the very back of your mouth, behind the arch. (A strep test, basically.) Then, stick the swab in each of your nostrils, as the instructions on the rapid test explain. While adding the throat sample is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for kits in the U.S., it’s standard in other places, like the United Kingdom. Given how omicron has mutated, it’s possible it should be standard here. Michael Mina, the epidemiologist who has been clamoring for more rapid tests since the early days of the pandemic, is another loud proponent of the throat swab. “Throat swab + nasal may improve chances a swab picks up virus,” he tweeted Monday.

The case for sweeping a swab around the back of your mouth in the age of omicron has some evidence to back it, if you’re willing to go by a couple of preprint papers. One published on the University of Hong Kong’s website by public health and pathology researchers on Dec. 15 explains that omicron “multiplies 70 times faster than the Delta variant and original SARS-CoV-2 in human bronchus.” Another published on medRxiv on Dec. 24 describes test results from 382 patients at a hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Patients tested themselves with both nasal and saliva swabs (which is different than a throat swab). The nasal swab method successfully caught all of the delta cases—but it missed 15 percent of those caused by omicron. In contrast, the saliva swab caught all of the omicron cases. (Mileage may vary with home tests; these were PCRs. Also keep in mind that people were recruited because they were already known to have COVID.)...

[winstars]

1. I have taken many tests in London. Its a swab of the throat and a single swab of the nose.

Every time.


Seems logical actually.

[deurbano]

2. I shared this link with my son, and he confirmed that's how they've been doing it in Oxford, too...

and as you said, it does seem logical. I guess he didn't think to tell me before because he assumed it was the same in the US.

[winstars]

3. On a lighter note, my joke is/was "do the throat first THEN the nasal swab" LOL

The order is important (to me!)

[deurbano]

4. The order is definitely important with this protocol! (To all of us!)