© Sebastien Bozon/AFP
Testing for COVID
Testing for COVID
Much of the world population who have undergone Covid-19 tests have likely experienced the rather unpleasant polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which, as many recipients attest, feels like the equivalent to having your brains scrambled like an egg or 'stabbed' given how far back in the throat and down the nose the swab must go. No penetration of the brain occurs in reality, however.
Authorities in China took things a few steps further and anally swabbed over one million Beijing residents for the more infectious UK variant of the coronavirus, insisting that the highly invasive method was more accurate than PCR tests.
In a new paper published by The Lancet's E Clinical Medicine, the researchers took sebum samples from 67 hospitalized patients, 30 of whom had tested positive for Covid-19 and 37 who had tested negative. Sebum is the fatty, oily, waxy substance produced by the body's sebaceous glands in areas such as the face, neck or back. Too little can cause dry, cracked skin while too much can cause various forms of acne.
The sebum samples were subjected to analysis via liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. The results were then combined with a statistical modeling technique called Partial Least Squares to differentiate Covid-positive and -negative patient samples.
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