Japan has formally asked Chinese authorities to stop taking Covid-19 anal swab tests of their citizens when entering the country. Japan has claimed that some of their citizens have felt violated and that the tests have caused them significant psychological stress.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told reporters:
"Some Japanese reported to our embassy in China that they received anal swab tests, which caused great psychological pain."
The Japanese diplomat added that the tests were being used only in China and that their scientific merit was not established.
The test involves a swab being entered a few centimetres into the person's rectum and being slowly rotated.
Medics in China have claimed that the anal swab test is far better at detecting Covid-19 than the traditional test that involves entering a swab into the nose and the throat. They are now being used as part of China's mass testing program which has seen, in some cities, millions of citizens being tested at once in order to weed out the virus. China, where the pandemic began, is close to eliminating Covid-19 within the country and almost all recent cases have been imported by people entering from abroad.
China has thus far not responded to the Japanese request to stop the use of anal swabs.
It is not the first time that the Chinese Covid-19 anal swab has caused controversy. Earlier this year, a video went viral on Chinese social-media, allegedly showing a family waddling along a street. It was claimed by social-media pranksters that they had been subject to an anal-swab test. The video was quickly shown to be a hoax, but it brought hilarity across the globe, with the story even being shared on major Western news networks. The Chinese authorities, worried that the video would stop others presenting themselves for a test, quickly sought to ban the video online and block websites and social-media pages that shared the video.
Despite Covid-19 being believed to have originated in a wet-market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, China's swift action and draconian lockdown measures has brought the virus firmly under control. To date, in a country of 1.6 billion people, there has been less than 90,000 confirmed cases and less than 5,000 deaths. This compares to the United States, which has suffered well over 500,000 deaths and still has widespread nationwide infection.
[h/t: BBC]
COMMENTS