The common cold will not cause COVID-19's throat swab to be positive. The throat swab here generally refers to the throat swab detected in COVID-19. 70%-80% of upper respiratory tract infections are caused by viruses, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenovirus and coxsackie virus. The ribonucleotides of these viruses are different from those of COVID-19 virus, so they will not show positive results.

Moreover, a patient with positive nucleic acid test results cannot be diagnosed as novel coronavirus infection, but two or more throat swabs are positive, and a diagnosis can only be made by combining the patient's clinical manifestations and lung CT examination results.

How to make a throat swab so as not to feel uncomfortable? If your throat is not sensitive, the pharyngeal reflex will be lighter, or even there will be no obvious pharyngeal reflex. If your throat is sensitive or you have chronic pharyngitis, nausea and vomiting will be more serious. It is suggested that the public should not do throat swabs immediately after eating to avoid retching undigested food; When sampling, the public should relax, open their mouths and make an "ah" shape, which is convenient for medical staff to sample, avoid retching caused by repeated invalid sampling, and don't lean back to avoid falling.

Can rhinitis be a nasal swab? It depends.

For some chronic sinusitis, if there are no uncomfortable symptoms, you can do a nasal swab. However, if it is an acute attack of sinusitis, symptoms such as congestion, swelling, increased purulent secretion or headache will generally appear. At this time, nasal swab should be avoided as much as possible, which may not only lead to sampling failure, but also cause severe pain in the nose. Therefore, it is suggested that whether patients with rhinitis can do nasal swab should be decided according to their current personal situation.

4 Which is more accurate, a throat swab or a nose swab? Studies have shown that the detection rate of COVID-19 nucleic acid in nasopharyngeal swab is higher than that in oropharyngeal swab, because the nasopharyngeal cavity is relatively closed, and the virus is more easily enriched. However, there are many factors that affect the accuracy of nucleic acid detection. In addition to sampling related factors such as sampling location, sampling method and the cooperation of the sampled people, there are many factors that have nothing to do with sampling, such as infection site, viral load and laboratory detection methods. Choosing a sampling location is just one of them.

Collecting multiple samples such as oropharyngeal swab and nasopharyngeal swab at the same time can relatively improve the accuracy of nucleic acid detection, but the most important thing is that the collection action must be standardized, in place and up to standard. As long as the collection is standardized, both methods can achieve the expected detection purpose.