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[–] Silver_Sky 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

Playing devils advocate, the higher concentration of the virus that they can test, the more likely the test will give an accurate result. Accurately testing for the virus in a water solution 100% saturated with viral particles is easier than accurately testing for the virus on one of these bore cleaner q tips. If you were to bkow on the thing, you would likely only deposit a few tens of thousands of viral particals - enough to make someine sick, but that's an astronomically small amount of mass to test for. Roughly speaking, these viruses are 10-100 nano meters in size IIRC which is much closer to being the size of a single atom than to the size of a human cell. I know a lot of these tests rely on decomposing the viruses DNA, RNA, or proteins and watching for them to bind to chemicals, and a very real problem with this kind of testing is not having enough viral material to get over the activation threshold of the testing chemicals, therefore you need to get a dense sample to guarantee accurate results. Now, whether or not these tests are accurate is another question...

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[–] alphazebra 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

See my response to @4therepublic above