Snickers aside, the policy is a real one — in China at least.
The Communist superpower is rolling out an expanded COVID-19 testing program to include anal swabs for high-risk patients, calling it a more accurate method than nasal and throat testing, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The myriad puns aside, China health experts believe the science is solid and the method should be applied to some of their at-risk citizens.
The tests, however, are not as easy to administer or pleasant to endure — for obvious reasons — compared to more conventional testing methods. Therefore, they are mainly being conducted on high-risk patients and those in quarantine, The Guardian reported.
Young students in Beijing have been tested for the virus using a variety of methods, including nasal, throat and anal swabs, according to a report earlier this month in The Global Times.
“I believe anal swabs for COVID-19 PCR is being advanced as a test because the viral loads in the rectum can be higher than the nasopharynx,” said Dr. David Cennimo, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, in an email. “In theory, the test should be more sensitive because the virus would be easier to detect at a higher copy number.”
However, don’t expect to see coronavirus anal swabs in New Jersey any time soon, he added.
“But the virus also is found in stool/rectal samples after it has cleared from the nasopharynx,” he said. “This may lead to overdiagnosis of people who have recovered and just have persistent PCR positive [results]. Regardless, I do not see this as a strategy conducive to real world testing of large numbers of people as I would expect significant numbers to refuse. If that happened, we may worsen the epidemic because people will actively avoid testing and continue to spread the virus while going undiagnosed.”
Health officials in China recently took anal swab testing more seriously, citing studies that found the virus survives longer in the lower digestive tract and in excrement than in the respiratory tract, the Global Times reported.
China rolled out the new testing protocols and pointed to some COVID-19 patients still recovering in the hospital who had tested negative via nose and throat tests but positive with anal swabs, according to the Washington Post.
In August, Chinese researchers published a report on anal swab tests, proposing they are “the potentially optimal specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection for evaluation of hospital discharge of COVID-19 patients.”
It’s unclear whether anything like it could ever be rolled out in the U.S. According to the Washington Post, even Chinese residents believe the new protocols would leave patients too embarrassed. The report cited a poll conducted on a Chinese social media platform that found 80% of respondents “could not accept” such a method.
Draconian measures to halt the spread of COVID-19 are nothing new in China.
It did lock down Wuhan — a city of 11 million residents — for months. Millions have been rounded up for mandatory testing, including overnight flash-testing, with people herded into lines on the street in the dark, the Washington Post reports. And health officials sometimes have sealed apartment buildings to keep people from leaving.
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Spencer Kent may be reached at skent@njadvancemedia.com.