CU Medicine Brochure

DANCES WITH A DISEASE: how CUMED takes on COVID-19 23 Children arriving by air in Hong Kong are being offered free stool tests to see if asymptomatic kids may unknowingly be carrying COVID-19. CUMED has volunteered to run the free tests of the stools of young children and infants coming into the Hong Kong International Airport. Working with the Department of Health, the CUMED team arranged for stool test kits to be distributed from 29 March onwards to arriving children, including specimen collection details. A CUHK laboratory tested the specimens and provided the results to the Department of Health within a day of receiving the stool samples. Deep-throat saliva tests, used to detect the virus in adults, provide a false negative result for the virus at a rate of more than 40% if the sample is collected incorrectly. It is particularly hard to collect a deep-throat sample from young children or infants, who will generally struggle to avoid it. CUMED has shown that the virus is detectable in the stool samples of all COVID-19 patients, regardless of the severity of illness. The stool sample returned a positive test in 20% to 30% of patients who no longer registered any trace of the virus in their respiratory-tract samples. Although often spared symptoms, children are thought to be silent carriers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Avoiding any undetected imported cases in families returning from abroad will be key in preventing its spread.