“When it comes to at-home rapid antigen COVID-19 tests, those swabs are for your nose and not your throat,” the agency recently posted on Twitter. It’s definitely plausible.”īut the FDA has not authorized any at-home self tests with throat swabs and has warned of the potential dangers of sticking a swab near the throat. “That’s different from what we’ve seen with all the previous variants, so it would make sense that virus levels are higher in the oral vs. Diane Havilr, chief of the HIV/AIDS Division at UCSF and the study’s senior author. “Based on the pathogenesis of the disease, we are seeing hundreds of people with COVID-19 are so prominent with Omicron,” says Dr. Some early studies also show that the virus might start in the throat and move into the nasal passages, meaning that swabbing the throat might provide positive results in someone who is infected earlier than swabbing the nose. (In fact, one of Omicron’s hallmark symptoms is a sore throat). While previous versions of the virus focused relatively quickly on the lungs-burrowing into tissues there, replicating and potentially causing serious and life-threatening breathing problems-studies show that Omicron prefers the nose and throat. As a respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2 infects people through the nose and mouth by way of virus-containing droplets that can travel in the air and also transfer from person to person via certain surfaces.

That might have to do with a changing understanding of how Omicron in particular journeys through the human body when it infects a person, and where it likes to settle in and set up its virus-copying hub. Why are people interested in throat swabs? The group is planning to test people by sampling from both their throats and noses using the at-home kits in coming days and compare those results. Because the results correlate well with the PCR results, they also provide support that the nose is a good place for collecting samples for the test. Those results provide reassurance that the at-home tests can indeed detect which people are infected with the Omicron variant. BD, another test kit maker, also declined to comment except to say that its test “is not authorized for use with a throat swab or a saliva sample.” Siemens, which received the most recent authorization for its over-the-counter rapid test, declined to comment on the throat vs. A spokesperson from Abbott, which makes the popular BinaxNOW kits, says the test, using a nasal swab, is 95.6% sensitive in detecting virus in people within seven days of having symptoms, when they are the most infectious. The FDA authorized the tests based on studies showing that nasal swab samples are effective for picking up signs of SARS-CoV-2, and manufacturers of the at-home rapid antigen tests also stress that their kits are designed and most accurate for testing with nasal samples. In the U.S., the official word is that nasal swabbing works well for rapid tests. Here’s what we know so far about the different ways to swab for COVID-19 rapid tests and how effective they are.

Id now vs binax now