Here's what we know so far about the different ways to swab for COVID-19 rapid tests and how effective they are
finding that test samples collected in the throat might detect the presence of the virus earlier than samples collected in the nose, have led to growing online questions about whether people should swab their throat instead of their nose when using a rapid self-test. In the U.K., some testing kits include instructions for people to first swab their throat and then the nose to get the most sensitive reading.
Some recent evidence also points to the effectiveness of this method. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco reported the results of acomparing nasal swabs done using at-home test kits against the gold-standard PCR tests that require deeper nasopharyngeal swabs performed by health professionals. They found that the at-home self-swabs of the front part of the nose performed almost as well as the PCR tests.
The study involved 731 people who went to a free community testing and vaccination site run by UCSF, the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub, the Latino Task Force and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. People who consented to the study were swabbed four times by a medical professional: once in each nostril using Abbott’s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test swab, and once in each nostril using a longer PCR swab. The results were compared for the two different testing methods.
The group is planning to test people by sampling from both their throats and noses using the at-home kits in coming days and compare those results.That might have to do with a changing understanding of how Omicron in particular journeys through the human body when it infects a person, and where it likes to settle in and set up its virus-copying hub.
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