A Comparison of Self-Collected Nasal Flocked Swabs with Staff-collected Nasopharyngeal or Nasal swabs for Respiratory Tract Sampling in Volunteers

Objectives: Nasal swabs (NS) for diagnosis of respiratory viruses are less invasive than nasopharyngeal swabs (NPS), and may enable selfcollection. Previously, we studied 2 NS prototypes, and found them equivalent to NPS in sampling epithelial cells, but self-collection was inferior to staff collection. In this study we modified one of the nasal flocked swab (NFS) to optimize sampling and comfort, and to validate that 2 sequential NS will optimize respiratory cell sampling. Our objective was to examine if the new Copan NFS is equivalent to NPS in sampling the respiratory tract, and if self-sampling is equivalent to staff sampling.