Has anyone heard of these, and are they even remotely accurate? My employer is going to be offering these for eligible asymptomatic employees.

Is the accuracy of these even remotely good enough that you would consider taking one?

Edit -

It is this test

In my lab we haven't tested this exact oral swab, but we have done some (very limited) testing on saliva and found similar sensitivity to the nasal swab.

In the end, this is exactly the same test (assuming it's being used for the qPCR based assay), it's just starting with a different primary sample material.

The main question is how much virus are you getting via this collection method vs the nasopharyngeal swab. From the limited studies I've seen, it's comparable.

There is one group (Rutgers / Spectrum DNA) that has a saliva based self-collection kit which appears to work just as well.

Interesting. Do you see any real benefit to getting tested now, having absolutely zero symptoms?

My personal opinion is that it depends on your exposure to others. And I'm talking from the perspective of protecting anyone "at risk" that you'd be in consistent close contact with.

For me, I get tested every week. My whole lab does. None of us are in a high-risk demographic, but we're all in close proximity to one another as a consequence of the lab layout, for hours a day. We want to minimize the collateral damage so to speak if one of us does get infected.

So far I've had two people in my lab test positive (of ~25 total people). One got it from her husband who works in a Houston area restaurant, and the other thinks he must have contracted it over Memorial day weekend when he went to a bar to play pool. Thankfully, the timing on both was such that neither was actually in the lab for the 2-3 days prior to becoming symptomatic, so we didn't have an exposure risk for the larger group. But it's only a matter of time.

I was very surprised that swabbing method was approved back in April. In my opinion it was a knee-jerk approval due to the hysteria at the time because so much was unknown and the absolute lack of testing capacity was staring all of us in the face.

I understand it was primarily done because people aren't willing to self collect a deeper sample, and there were huge concerns about the PPE required to do a proper NP swab (since it often makes people sneeze), but using a nares or anterior nares swab for diagnosis of a respiratory virus is very inconsistent at best.

My lab works closely with a clinical respiratory virus diagnostic lab (they run a panel for 21 different respiratory viruses). We've run a ton of combinations over the years of swab styles/sizes, swab materials, swabbing depths (nares, mid-turbinate, nasopharyngeal, oropharyngeal, etc..) for multiple respiratory viruses to compare the impact of sampling on test results.

FWIW, swabbing as shown in that video greatly increases the number of false negatives on all viruses we've tested, though we have not specifically tested SARS-CoV-2 patients.

If you read Labcorp's emergency use authorization submission to the FDA, they don't even test samples collected this way. They use NP swabs to validate their assay and set the test limit of detection. They then "validate" home collection by having people collect the swabs on themselves as shown in the video, and then randomly spike in virus to show that it survives transit through the mail.

They never test whether a nares swab vs. an NP swab has an impact. And those of us that have looked know it can make a huge difference.

anyway, no point. Your link just reminded of that whole situation.