[ The new protocol comes
just over a year after the virus began spreading rapidly in the country.
Chinese officials are worried about the approach of Lunar New Year next month,
often called the world’s largest annual migration. Some 3 billion trips are
made over the holiday during a non-pandemic year, which means even a single
silent coronavirus case
could rapidly leapfrog across the nation.]
By Eva Dou
But now they face a new indignity:
the addition of anal swabs — yes, you read that right — to the testing regimen
for those in quarantine.
Chinese state media outlets introduced
the new protocol in recent days, prompting widespread discussion and
some outrage. Some Chinese doctors say the science is there. Recovering
patients, they say, have continued to test positive through samples from the
lower digestive tract days after nasal and throat swabs came back negative.
Yet for many, it seemed a step too
far in government intrusions after a year and counting of a dignity-eroding
pandemic.
“Everyone involved will be so
embarrassed,” one user in Guangdong province said Wednesday on Weibo, a
Chinese social media platform. In a Weibo poll, 80 percent of respondents
said they “could not accept” the invasive method.
Even Chinese doctors who support
the new tests said the method’s inconvenience meant it made sense for use only
in select groups, such as at quarantine centers.
“If we add anal swab testing, it
can raise our rate of identifying infected patients,” Li Tongzeng, an
infectious-disease specialist at Beijing You’an Hospital, said on state-run
broadcaster CCTV on Sunday. “But of course, considering that collecting anal
swabs is not as convenient as throat swabs, at the moment only key groups such
as those in quarantine receive both.”
[A
year after Wuhan coronavirus lockdown, trauma runs deep in China’s ‘Hero City’]
The new protocol comes just over a
year after the virus began spreading rapidly in the country. Chinese officials
are worried about the approach of Lunar New Year next month, often called the
world’s largest annual migration. Some 3 billion trips are made over the
holiday during a non-pandemic year, which means even a single silent coronavirus case could rapidly leapfrog across the
nation.
China is seeking to vaccinate 50 million people before the
holiday, but that’s less than 4 percent of its population, far too low a
rate to prevent mass transmission.
Officials have tightened
restrictions in recent weeks, with tens of millions of people returned to
lockdown in areas with isolated outbreaks. As before, travelers arriving from
overseas go straight into two weeks of hotel quarantine — but now a week of
home quarantine has been added, as well as a week of daily reports to health
officials.
Since the beginning of the
pandemic, China has been willing to take draconian measures to halt the spread
of the coronavirus, even at enormous inconvenience to its population. In the
early days of lockdowns, health officials sometimes sealed apartment buildings
to keep people from leaving. Millions were rounded up for overnight flash-testing drives, with people forming lines in
the streets in darkness.
After an outbreak at Shanghai’s
international airport in November, officials locked thousands of employees inside for
testing, prompting a terrifying stampede.
Now, with infections stubbornly
continuing to emerge ahead of the holiday, the government has approved an
expanded use of anal swab testing.
China tried the testing procedure
in small groups last year, with the results circulated in research journals. A
group of Chinese researchers published
a study in the Future Microbiology journal in August reporting that
for some recovering coronavirus patients, anal swab samples still tested
positive after they had tested negative through throat swabs.
[Politics
frustrate WHO mission to search for origins of coronavirus in China]
“Intriguingly, SARS-CoV-2 detection
was positive in the anal swab of two patients and negative in throat swab and
sputum samples,” they wrote. “We propose anal swabs as the potentially optimal
specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection for evaluation of hospital discharge of
covid-19 patients.”
As for how the test is conducted,
the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published instructions
last March. It said that a stool sample should be taken from patients, and if
that is not possible, to do an anal swab by inserting a cotton-tipped stick
three to five centimeters (one to two inches) into the rectum.
In recent days, the state-run
tabloid Global Times noted that the procedure was controversial, with some
doctors saying nasal and throat swabs were more effective because coronavirus
is a respiratory infection.
“There have been cases concerning
the coronavirus testing positive in a patient’s excrement, but no evidence has
suggested it had been transmitted through one’s digestive system,” the Global
Times cited Yang Zhanqiu, a pathologist at Wuhan University, as saying.
Chinese social media was awash with
comments of disbelief and concern about the new test procedure.
“It’s difficult for the nurses,”
said one person on Weibo.
“We must really try hard to avoid
catching coronavirus!!” said another.
Read more
A
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