 What's up, fam? Raif Derrazy here. Recently, I posted a video about my drive-through COVID-19 testing experience, and before that, I also shared with you my profoundly horrific porta-potty experience. If you've never had to dunk your hand and part of your arm rest into the porta-potty sludge for any reason in your life, consider yourself fortunate because I had to do that. And I explained the story in the previous video, so if you haven't seen it yet, check it out. It's worth watching just for that story and not to mention the drive-through testing experience. As promised, I said I was going to do a follow-up and let you know about the result. So the official results of my COVID-19 test are that it was negative. Here you can see the email that I received stating that it was negative. I mean, honestly, it was a little surprising to me because of the symptoms that I had been experiencing and the chest pain that was still lingering and never having experienced anything like that before. And shortly after, I started seeing articles, news coverage of how they were doing testing for COVID-19. So I was seeing that by and large most of the testing that was being done was as a nasal swab. So I decided to look up a little bit further. I went onto the CDC website and looked up their COVID-19 testing guidelines and what they had to say on the website. I mean, right away you can see here that they're constantly revising this. They've got one, two, three, four, five revisions that have been made just in the month of March. But the thing that stood out to me about the CDC website and what it says in reference to COVID-19 testing is that there is an emphasis on the nasal swabs, also known as the nasopharyngeal swab, as opposed to the oropharyngeal swab, which is what I got in my drive-through testing. So the oropharyngeal is through the mouth and targeting the back of the throat. And the nasopharyngeal swab, you're going through the nose to the very back. So you can see here you have the oropharyngeal part of the throat and then the nasopharyngeal, they're close, but they're not the same thing. There's a distinction between the two. And what we know about this virus, this disease, is that when it is in the upper respiratory tract, it is in the nasopharyngeal area primarily. That's where it likes to be. That's where the receptors are for the virus. So that's why there's an emphasis on the nasopharyngeal swab. And what I got is close to an oropharyngeal swab, but it really wasn't. Here you can see in the instructions how it says to swab in my mouth. And that's the thing, it was in my mouth, not past my mouth into my throat. It was just a swab inside of each cheek and the roof of my mouth. It said nothing about going to the back of the throat. So that's a very different from an accurate oropharyngeal swab. If we look here on the website, the revisions that are made, here we have on March 19th, the following revision allowance for OP, which is oropharyngeal swab, as an acceptable specimen type if NP swabs are not available. So that implies the NP swabs are the preferred method for testing. But if they're not available, they've revised, they've changed on March 19th, that the OP oropharyngeal swab is an acceptable specimen in lieu of the NP. But the NP is the gold standard that we're looking for here. Down here under upper respiratory tract for the NP and the OP, I'm going to go with the OP because that's the closest thing that I had. It even says here for the oropharyngeal swab, the throat swab, swab the posterior of pharynx. I'll put that image up again so you can see the pharynx is in the back here, the oropharyngeal and the nasal pharyngeal area, avoiding the tongue. The directions didn't even say anything about avoiding the tongue. I'm sure I touched my tongue. I was loosey-goosey about it. I just put it in my mouth, got one cheek inside, slid the cotton swab over the other side, got a little bit of the roof. It was not anything like what the CDC is suggesting needs to be done for an oropharyngeal swab. So with that said, I'm very dubious about my results. Not only that, but previously I had spoken to my doctor and from my onset of symptoms to the point when I had spoken to him on the phone, it had already been 14 days. He said, you're a lot of time for quarantine is over. You don't have to worry about quarantining anymore. Even though in my head, logic and reason said, well, I still have symptoms. So, and who's to say that at 14 days the virus decides to shut down and no longer be symptomatic and virally contagious. Regardless, I had someone who was coming to stay with me, my partner is going to be living with me now. So that wasn't something that we could really get around. And so he came, we both understood the inherent risks and shortly after that he started to also experience mild symptoms. They ranged from light coughing, headache, feelings of fatigue, lightheadedness, and then in the recent week or so had a complete loss of taste and smell, which as you may know is a symptom of people who are infected with COVID-19. I've had a couple people reach out to me on social media saying that they and or their roommates had those symptoms and sometimes even just the symptoms of loss of taste and smell and were tested positive for COVID-19. At the point of my getting tested, I no longer had upper respiratory symptoms. My sore throat was gone. I didn't have anything going on in my upper respiratory tract. It was all just chest pain and tension and restriction and achiness in the chest area. With that in mind, I would like to point out some other articles here. There's a news week article that also talked about COVID testing. And here we have Joshua Moon, a research fellow in sustainability research methods in the science policy research unit at the University of Sussex Business School in the UK saying that efficacy of these tests depend on the volume of virus particle on the swab so can be hampered by the different stages of infection, where viral load is lower or higher. They will also be affected by the swabbing technique as oropharyngeal and anterior nares swabs are likely to pick up less virus particles. Because COVID infects the nasopharynx and upper respiratory tract, they may be less effective at detecting cases. I also found an article on CEBM, which is the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine, and they analyzed a couple studies that were done recently on the COVID-19 testing and the efficacy of OP versus NP swabs. Now this comes with the disclaimer because these studies, the sample size is so small, and these studies are not peer reviewed, which is typically standard. And there's a lot of information circumstantially about these tests, about these studies that are missing. So in layman's terms it's kind of a sloppy job relative to scientific standards on how this kind of work should be done. And in normal times this would not get that much attention for that reason, but these aren't normal times. We're in the middle of a global pandemic and data is constantly coming in. Our understanding of what's going on is constantly changing and time is not on our side. I want to present some findings here but take it with a grain of salt again. One paper Yang 2020 examined 205 throat swabs and 490 nasal swabs. They reported the positive test results that they got with those swabs throughout different stages of their illness. So for example between day 0 to 7 patients with mild symptoms with the oral pharyngeal swab show basically a 10% discrepancy between the two swab tests. By day 8 to 14, now here's where it really starts to show the difference between the two swab methods. We've got mild cases and there's over a 20% difference in the amount of positive results that were shown. They have the same patient and they give them both the oral pharyngeal swab and the nasal pharyngeal swab and there's a 20% discrepancy between the two and in severe cases there's also more than 20% discrepancy. On day 15 plus it just really really separates from there on out especially for the mild cases. For the mild cases there's over a 40% difference. In the mild cases after day 15 and plus the oral pharyngeal tests were reporting positive in only 11.1% of cases and for me to look at this and know that I had this conversation with my doctor after day 14 of symptoms and then getting an oral pharyngeal test and then not even having it done properly and seeing this 11.1% number kind of leaves me at the very minimum to believe that my test is inconclusive and I suspect that I had COVID-19 and that my partner as a result also developed symptoms related to COVID-19 but that's something I'll never know. But I think this is important for you guys to be aware of these things so that if you do get an OP swab you can make sure it's done correctly, you can bring up your concerns about how long you've had symptoms and stuff like that and just just for general awareness. I know that we've been scrambling to get testing in this country especially in the US but if we're going to have tests that are only going to be 11% accurate after day 15 it's really a shame because then we're going to get a lot of unreported positives and that skews all our numbers and it skews the actions that we take as a country to move forward with dealing with this pandemic. Another small study that was done in Germany called Wolfle 2020 and this study showed that swabs that were taken after day five of symptoms had a detection rate of 45.95% and found no discernible differences in viral loads or detection rates when comparing NP and OP. Again there's very little information there otherwise did those numbers divert after 10 days after 12 days we don't really know much else aside from that. But yeah I thought this was really interesting to know and it kind of wasn't really surprising to me considering how I was feeling and the symptoms and then what my partner's symptoms were and what I knew about the virus and where it tends to live in the respiratory tract and the way that my testing was done logically again I just knew that that was kind of not didn't seem right and then being able to see on the CDC the suggestions for nasopharyngeal over oral pharyngeal and then also being able to find some small studies that were reporting varying differences in positive test results between the two swab methods kind of reaffirmed my own suspicions about it. I've made peace with the fact that I may never know whether I had COVID-19 or not. In the end I'm just thankful and glad that it was mild whatever I had and that I'm feeling good and that my partner's feeling good and so we have a lot to be thankful in that respect and the newness of this pandemic and also of the testing accuracies and now I also urge you all to take care of yourselves and your own health and the health of those around you and if possible make a mask start wearing a mask anytime you leave your home do your part to protect others and to protect yourself. Thank you for joining me and talking about this issue. I know that this isn't my typical content I know it veers off a little bit from my brand but in the end this is something that impacts the entire globe equally it doesn't discriminate and it affects our fitness our health our well-being our mental stability so in that respect it's very much inaligned with the things that I talk about and our overall ability to live a happy fulfilling life. I will be back shortly I'm not going anywhere and I hope you'll continue to allow me into your home to be a voice of comfort education maybe a little inspiration take care and stay healthy.