Clinical Procedures
infection, throat
INFECTION
Patients were randomly assigned to test or placebo group using a randomization table
generated by SPSS, version 26 (SPSS, Inc.), immediately after the SARS-CoV-2 antigen test
turned out to be positive. Then, baseline (BL) oropharyngeal specimens were acquired by
letting the patients gargle their mouth and throat with 10 mL 0.9% NaCl for 20 s. These
specimens were used for qRT-PCR–based confirmation of infection with SARS-CoV-2 and
genotyping and as baseline specimens for determination of viral load and determination of
tissue culture infection doses 50% (TCID