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Comment by vaalbara | Hacker News Reader

I had been doing a poor job swabbing too shallow, and I wonder if that's also a significant contributor to false negatives. This video helped me a lot [0]. In brief: don't swab just the shallow, hairy skin of the nose, and don't swab upwards. Instead, go slow and go straight back perpendicular to your face about 2-3cm to get to the mucosa of the respiratory lining, twirl for 15 seconds. It helped to see this ENT surgeon do it slowly and calmly, while talking through it. He goes much deeper than I had ever done on my own.

0. https://twitter.com/DrEricLevi/status/1477057391212449793

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Both times I've had it I did it pretty shallow in the front of my nose and it was really dark for me on the peak day, unmistakable, much darker whan the C stripe. The other 2-3 days I had it it was about the same color as the C stripe.

When you’re very infected then even the most casual of swabs will pick it up. The OP is instead addressing that doing it in the very front of your nose may not get sufficient viral load to detect lower levels of infection. This is doubly problematic when combined with different newer strains (omicron for example was a big step down in test sensitivity), for which tests are not as sensitive towards by virtue of being designed for the OG strain.

My technique is to actually swab the back of my throat, then as deep in my nose as I can tolerate - I’m usually actually running out of stick on the swab before it’s too deep for me. I figure I want to grab any possible trace of virus if it’s there and I’d far prefer a false positive that disappears a day later than a false negative.

Ever get a positive test like that? I've avoided jamming them in my throat because I don't want to get saliva up my nose, and have a nagging feeling that it'll mess with results.

I've usually blown my nose, spun the thing around the suggested distance up my nose, pull it out because I'm about to sneeze, then repeat that process until it has been up both sides for the suggested time. Usually needing to blow my nose out 2-6 times total, with a bell-curve amount of snot coming out across each time. Had it one time, and the first time I did it was the darkest I've ever seen a line on one of those tests.

I wish there were more cheap at home tests like these, for other stuff. The last tests I picked up were 2 for €4 in Lidl. I tried about as many different branded ones as I came across throughout the pandemic. Was neat to see the different approaches they used for packaging/documenting/labelling what amounted to a long swab, some buffer solution, and a tiny test strip.

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