日記45 : Antigen Test for COVID-19

I immediately searched for the English word for “antigen test,” but after I found out it was this word, I should have come up with a translation myself.
A while ago, I took a COVID-19 antigen test at a clinic. I wanted a medical professional to do it for me because I wasn’t confident in doing it myself, but the clinic told me to do it myself and gave me a swab and a tube. So, I had to put the swab inside my nose with fear and pain. I gave it to the staff, but she said it didn’t work, so it ended up that the staff put a new swab in my nose and did the test again. As I supposed, I couldn’t do that by myself.

Today, I decided to do this again for safety’s sake. This time, I purchased antigen test kits at a pharmacy. From my previous experience, it’s reckless to try a nasal sampling kit, so I bought a saliva sampling kit. To my embarrassment, I didn’t know the word “saliva” even though I have majored in science since high school.

The test result was negative. I started to be anxious about whether the result was true. It was so easy to use the saliva sampling kit that I ended up wondering if the nasal sampling kit might be more accurate. However, the official clinical data said that the sensitivity of saliva samples is almost the same as that of nasal samples. It goes against my intuition, but I believe it and that I am negative.