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Standardized Sampling by the Same Nurse Could Improve the Positive Rate and Consistency of the Throat Swabs to Detect COVID-19
16 Pages Posted: 3 Mar 2020
More...Abstract
Emerging worldwide pandemic COVID-19 is spreading around the world. At present, the diagnosis of COVID-19 mainly depends on qRT-PCR assay of throat swabs. However, false negative rate of nucleic acid test for SARS-CoV-2 with throat swabs is high, also patients are extreme suffering from throat swabs. The lingual swab is convenient and may achieve the same effect. This study compares the differences between lingual swab and throat swab sampling results, and to analyze whether standard sampling by the same nurse could improve the positive rate and consistency of the swabs comparing with sampling by several nurses. The results showed that the positive rate of throat swabs is significantly increased as that of lingual swabs for the detection of COVID-19. Standard sampling by the same nurse helps to improve the consistency of swabs testing for COVID-19.
Funding Statement: This work is supported by the Medical Science Advancement Program of Wuhan University (TFLC2018002).
Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.
Ethics Approval Statement: Informed consent was provided by all subjects. All procedures in this study were done in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee.
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