[James_Henry]

There's evidence that for Covid-19 it's not necessary to go as far back as people have been going. There's also evidence that self-collection works well. The FDA has acknowledged this before and allowed self-collection with physician oversight before they allowed this test.

[MikeAmelung]

Where is this evidence? How does this square with the evidence that RT-PCR tests are already coming back falsely negative, probably due to missing the virus while swabbing? Pardon me for being skeptical, but this is all from the same people who have bungled this every step of the way.

[cbhl]

I'm having trouble finding the actual study, but UnitedHealth Group, working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Quest Diagnostics, and the University of Washington did a study on the efficacy of self-swabbing.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/25/study-behind-updated-fda-g...

[James_Henry]

I found the paper. I haven't read through it so I can't say if it is actually any good, but it is good enough that the FDA changed their recommendations because of it (that might not mean much, of course).

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20050005v...

[MikeAmelung]

Thanks for tracking it down. Doesn't seem to be any problem with accepting their results that it's almost as good as a nasopharyngeal swab, so you won't see me complaining about it again.

[takeda]

Not really an evidence, but looks like their instructions explicitly say to not insert it deep: https://www.pixel.labcorp.com/covid-19-sample-collection