A nasal test for COVID-19 takes just a few seconds, but getting a long swab stuck up the nose isn’t an experience many people would describe as pleasant.
New research led by a team at St. Paul’s Hospital hopes to make the diagnostic process a bit more comfortable. Their study found that rotating the swab after it’s inserted into the nose – a step that makes the procedure take longer, and may increase patient discomfort – does not improve the quality of the sample collected and is therefore unnecessary.
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With that in mind, Dr. Leung approached Dr. Zabrina Brumme, the Laboratory Director at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and a Professor at Simon Fraser University, for help conducting an experimental study to reveal whether rotation of the swab improved the quality of the specimen collected. Luckily, methods to assess this were already in place at SFU and the BC-CfE, and Dr. Brumme was quickly able to redeploy graduate students and staff to help out.
Their study was published October 14 in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.