I’d rather have diarrhea than pneumonia

I’ve got a weird, yucky idea stuck in my head: would it make sense to purposely infect people with the COVID-19 virus with some kind of enema or suppository?

First reason this might be a stupid idea: the virus is designed to infect the mucus membranes in the respiratory system. It might not be able to infect the mucus membranes in the colon or vagina.

But something like 5% of COVID-19 sufferers report diarrhea as a symptom, so maybe it can infect the digestive tract?

If it can, the second reason it might be a stupid idea is if an infection in the digestive or reproductive system is more deadly than an infection that starts in the nose or sinuses. That seems unlikely to me, but before giving coronavirus enemas to a lot of people somebody should run a small, controlled trial to see how the body reacts to an infection ‘down there’ and whether or not it triggers an immune response that gives immunity.

However, if the results were promising, this could be a very low-tech, inexpensive, fast-to-deploy method for mitigating the spread of the virus. Get some infectious material from somebody who has the disease and (carefully!) use it to infect people via the rectum (or vagina or urethra or wherever causes the mildest symptoms with the most immune response).

The rich-country version of this might use carefully cultured and measured doses containing the minimum amount of virus needed to provoke an immune response, to keep the viral load as small as possible.

The poor country version of this might be to use already-recovered volunteers to collect spit from sick people and then… well, you get the idea.