Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Jul 30;383(5):494-496.
doi: 10.1056/NEJMc2016321. Epub 2020 Jun 3.

Swabs Collected by Patients or Health Care Workers for SARS-CoV-2 Testing

Yuan-Po Tu  1 , Rachel Jennings  2 , Brian Hart  2 , Gerard A Cangelosi  3 , Rachel C Wood  3 , Kevin Wehber  4 , Prateek Verma  4 , Deneen Vojta  4 , Ethan M Berke  4
Affiliations

Swabs Collected by Patients or Health Care Workers for SARS-CoV-2 Testing

Yuan-Po Tu et al. N Engl J Med. .
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Cycle Threshold (Ct) Values from Tongue, Nasal, and Mid-Turbinate Swabs Collected by Patients Relative to Those from Nasopharyngeal Swabs Collected by Health Care Workers.
The correlation coefficient is superimposed on each panel, along with a trend line estimated with the use of simple linear regression. Plots show the available Ct values for 43 patients who had positive test results from both tongue and nasopharyngeal swabs (Panel A), 46 patients who had positive test results from both nasal and nasopharyngeal swabs (Panel B), and 48 patients who had positive test results from both mid-turbinate and nasopharyngeal swabs (Panel C). Data on 4 patients (1 patient with positive test results from both tongue and nasopharyngeal swabs, 1 patient with positive test results from both nasal and nasopharyngeal swabs, and 2 patients with positive test results from both mid-turbinate and nasopharyngeal swabs) were not included in this analysis because multiple swabs obtained from these patients were labeled with a single test site (i.e., tongue, nasopharynx, nose, or middle turbinate).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Padilla M. ‘It feels like a war zone’: doctors and nurses plead for masks on social media. New York Times. March 19, 2020. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/hospitals-coronavirus-ppe-shortage...).
    1. Seaman CP, Tran LTT, Cowling BJ, Sullivan SG. Self-collected compared with professional-collected swabbing in the diagnosis of influenza in symptomatic individuals: a meta-analysis and assessment of validity. J Clin Virol 2019;118:28-35. - PubMed
    1. Luabeya AK, Wood RC, Shenje J, et al. Noninvasive detection of tuberculosis by oral swab analysis. J Clin Microbiol 2019;57(3):e01847-e18. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wang W, Xu Y, Gao R, et al. Detection of SARS-CoV-2 in different types of clinical specimens. JAMA 2020;323:1843-1844. - PMC - PubMed
    1. To KK-W, Tsang OT-Y, Chik-Yan Yip C, et al. Consistent detection of 2019 novel coronavirus in saliva. Clin Infect Dis 2020. February 12 (Epub ahead of print). - PMC - PubMed

Publication types