The findings come as the U.S. is facing massive delays in coronavirus testing.
“There's no delay that's introduced by having to first call the clinic and then make an appointment and then come in and then have the swab collected. You have a test kit sent to your house,” she said. Getting results back, however, could still be delayed by bottlenecks at labs.Another advantage to the at-home test used in study is that it was less invasive, with the tip of the swab not being inserted as deep into the nose as the standard nasopharyngeal swab.
“It's encouraging that similar results were achieved with both,” Tara Smith, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University, said. “Nasopharyngeal swabs are tough even for health professionals to take correctly, so if we can get similar results from a swab that's less invasive, that's a positive outcome in my book.
Chu, the study’s lead author, also has past experience with at-home testing studies. She had been studying the effectiveness of at-home swabbing for influenza in a project called the Seattle Flu Study. An earlier study, from researchers at Stanford University, also found at-home coronavirus tests fared well compared to clinic-administered tests. That study, also published in
, reported thatpatient collected swabs were 100 percent as sensitive and 95 percent as specific as the swabs collected by health care workers.
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