Asymptomatic simply means has the disease but has no symptoms. It has no bearing on ability to spread. But YES asymptomatic COVID carriers have been proven to have spread the disease.
New Hampshire is also keeping kids out of the classroom for the remainder of the school year. And yeah, I don’t think the stay-home order that’s set through May 4th is going to expire without extension here, either.
There have been studies that show some asymptomatic carriers shed the virus extensively prior to becoming symptomatic (feeling ill). I believe those studies are linked earlier in this thread.
For whatever definition of ‘finally coming around’ you happen to be pointing to at the moment.
CMC fnord!
Rolleyes at me all you want. I want you to confirm that the infection rate from asymptomatic people is the same as those who become ill. I don’t think that is the case, and I don’t think the data supports that. I may be wrong. There is nothing bad about being wrong, which is why I ask.
“The same as”? We don’t even know the true mortality rate, let alone true infection rates.
Here is a case report of asymptomatic infection, from March 5:Transmission of 2019-nCoV Infection from an Asymptomatic Contact in Germany
It is known that around half of the people with detectable C19 are asysmptomatic:Asymptomatic and Presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Residents of a Long-Term Care Skilled Nursing Facility — King County, Washington, March 2020, and in my country (Australia), which is attempting full contact tracing, authorities are reporting that about half the cases are traced to asymptomatic carriers (I don’t have a citation for that).
It could be that half the cases are from asymptomatic carriers because half the carriers are asymptomatic, or it could be that although asymptomatic carriers are much less dangerous, they are also much less isolated.
May I ask what difference you think it makes? If people not showing symptoms can spread the disease at any significant rate (and it is clear that they do) the precautions are going to remain necessary until widespread testing and widespread effective inoculations are in place.
Yes it would change what many of the models result in. Assumptions were chosen to use for how many symptomatic carriers there are and how relatively contagious they are for how long to plug into the models. Those numbers were educated guesses but still guesses. Different inputs would have given different results.
The best guesses I’ve read to date are that asymptomatic infections are some fraction less contagious than symptomatic infections, but there are enough more of them (more than half), and they are enough more in contact with more others, that they drive the spread much more.
From a practical POV the message is that spread is driven more by those who do not know they are sick even though each of them might be individually less risk in the moment of exposure, so some degree of universal precautions is required if slowing down the spread is to be accomplished.
Apparently, it depends on what stage they are in. Of course, if you aren’t coughing like mad, you would be spreading less.
Still, they say symptomatic people are certainly contagious.
The difference is this. If the asymptomatic are less infectious than those displaying symptoms then after the initial surge in infections, the infection rate will drop. Which is what we are seeing. Now, you may claim that the drop in infection rate is due to “social distancing”, but if the drop is actually a result of those who are highly susceptible either become symptomatic (and spread the infection) or asymptomatic (and spread the infection at a much lower rate), then this will drop off at a very rapid rate once those susceptible have either caught the disease and recovered or have perished.
My point is that in the latter case, the entire issue will die off within two or three generations (a generation being apparently about 14 days), which is what we are seeing in most populations. The difference is that ones who impose drastic measures see fewer deaths, while those who do not see a rapid increase in deaths.
Regardless, if the asymptomatics spread the disease at a rate less than the symptomatic, then this has a signifiant influence on the models being used to predict infection rates. To assume they spread it at the same rate just doesn’t make sense, to me.
Until recently it was treated as a crackpot theory if it was addressed at all. Tonight on the CBS Evening News they had it as close to the top story and as a very strong possibility.
The article you posted dismisses it as unlikely. If it happened at all, it was accidental and weaponization has been ruled out.
Even if asymptomatic infections are ten times higher than we know about, that’s still not anywhere near a majority of the vulnerable population. For example, worldometer is currently reporting 710,000 diagnosed cases in the US (and not all of those are symptomatic). If we assume there are “really” 7.1 million, well, there are 49 million Americans over the age of 65, plus plenty more who are younger but have other health conditions rendering them susceptible. Are you attempting to argue that 100+ million Americans have already had COVID-19?
:rolleyes:
I want YOU to buy me a pony.
Thanks for sharing your uninformed opinion, I guess.
My bolding.
This is the report (video) from CBS News and no, they do not say what you claim they say.
The report simply states that US is investigating other possibilities than the wet market. It also states that there is no evidence implicated the Wuhan lab. It absolutely nothing about how possible that scenario is.
I don’t know how that got from there to being “a strong possibility” but that was not in the report.
2,250,790 total cases
154,266 dead
571,145 recovered
In the US:
710,021 total cases
37,158 dead
60,510 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
The problem is when you keep asking and keep asking and keep asking.
Yes. Asymptomatic people with covid-19 are contagious. They are contagious whether or not they later go to develop symptoms or never show symptoms.
This is not the only disease with that feature. People infected with measles also spread it before they actually get sick, that’s one reason measles is so contagious.
This fact - asymptomatic covid-19 cases are contagious - has been known for months. Here is a link to a study from February. If it makes you feel better not to believe it, well, I guess we can’t do anything about that. Other posters have provided you with this information, there are links provided and you have been told where to find them. It’s up to you to look at the information, we can’t do that for you.
Only if the RO is less than one. If the RO of the asymptomatic is greater than 1 the virus will continue to spread and the outbreak will continue to increase.
Because we don’t know for sure the RO of the asymptomatic - heck, we aren’t even too sure about it for people who do show symptoms - then we can’t be sure how much distancing is required. Can we do with less? Do we need more? We don’t know - and guessing wrong will kill more people than would die otherwise.
And… I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. Isn’t preventing suffering and death generally a good thing?
The virus doesn’t care if it “makes sense” to you or not.
The facts don’t care if they “makes sense” to you or not.
Maybe the words “we don’t know” are like fingernails on a blackboard for you, but I’d rather decisions be made based on science, medicine and facts than what “makes sense” to you, or to me. Life doesn’t always make obvious sense. “The Sun goes around the Earth” used to “make sense” to most people. Now most people know it’s the other way around.
No one knows for sure whether the virus was accidentally released from the lab or picked up from some animal in the wet market or whether it first infected some child who was playing the bat caves.
What we do know for sure is that it is a natural virus, not something engineered by humans. The virus has been sequenced by dozens (probably hundreds) of labs around the world. If you poke around the internet you can find graphics of all the variants that had been documents as of date X.
Here are two
https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global
And with our current state of the art genetic engineering, human-altered genomes leave telltale signs. And covid-19 doesn’t have any of those tells. And any of those many many labs, mostly outside of China, would be able to judge that.
If it wasn’t engineered by humans, then how was it in the lab? Seriously, that’s a CT and should not be graced with the light of day.