The main fear of Covid may not be its fatality rate (if you’re under age 40, your odds of dying are like 0.3 percent if you contract the disease) but rather the organ damage the virus inflicts. Any stats on how many people recover with an intact body and how many sustain significant organ damage?
I suspect that a solid number on this doesn’t exist yet, because we really don’t yet know what percentage of people who contract it remain completely asymptomatic, or have symptoms so mild that they don’t realize that they have the disease (and, thus, are never tested).
I’d peg it at about 35-40%. But that’s just gut instinct.
I hope the OP will correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the question refer to the percentage of symptomatic COVID patients? If one were asymptomatic, one would not, by definition, sustain organ damage, as that would present as symptoms, right?
Maybe?
As I understand it, the issue with the mortality numbers that we now have (and, I would imagine, the issue with numbers on organ damage) is that it’s based on known cases (i.e., patients who were tested and diagnosed with COVID-19), but the rate among known cases isn’t necessarily useful for us laymen to understand what the level of risk is, because it doesn’t include those people who (a) become infected and never develop symptoms, (b) develo mild symptoms, but never seek out a test, and (c) are exposed but may be naturally resistant to the darned thing.
If we only know the incidence of death (or organ damage) among the diagnosed, it can lead us to believe that our risk of those outcomes is higher than it actually is.
Asymptomatic people are just people who don’t show obvious signs of infection. They don’t include the people who have the nonobvious signs of infection.
A nonobvious sign of infection might be chilblain-like lesions.
A person can have signs and never seek out a diagnosis. Especially now with testing only being reserved for people showing obvious signs. I think what is unknown is how many people with subtle signs wind up having major health effects that simply don’t manifest right away. You may not know your kidneys are messed up, for instance, until you have one drink too many. It may take getting sick with another illness for you to realize your lung capacity is significantly reduced.
Let’s just say “We don’t know” rather than throw out wild-ass guesses based on “gut instinct”.
This is a real concern for both adults and children, and begs for caution about plans to achieve herd immunity through wide scale exposure. Back when it was believe that COVID-19 was just a respiratory illness the frequent claim that SARS-CoV-2 only developed into COVID-19 if people had some kind of underlying health problem or co-morbidity, e.g. hypertension, asthma, another infection. While we now know that this is not necessarily true, it is entirely possible that infection with SARS-CoV-2 could be an enabling co-morbidity for another infection or chronic health condition.
Even if the pathogenesis of two different pathogens do not amply one another, just having to fight off two different infections, e.g. SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza A, can overtax the immune system or cause a cytokine release syndrome that either alone would not do. And while it appears that SARS-CoV-2 does not remain dormant in host tissues for long durations, but there is so much that is unknown about this pathogenesis of this virus in vivo I would hesitate to say anything for sure beyond the fact that this has not been observed in other human-infecting betacoronaviruses of similar lineage (SARS-CoV(-1) and MERS-CoV). That it has been observed causing sub-clinical vasculitis in supposedly ‘asymptomatic’ patients is concerning because whatever is causing inflammation of endothelial tissues could potentially affect lymphatic vessels as well as everything connected with the circulatory system…which is every organ and the majority of tissues in your body.
So, we should definitely be cautious about how the contagion is allowed to expand because even though we cannot stop it without a virus, we do not want the scenario where people who were infected months ago start having unexpected morbidity due to otherwise mild colds or influenza. It is also an argument for strongly pushing seasonal influenza vaccination.
Stranger
It was a joke. “Organ damage”, “gut instinct”.
Organ damage can sneak up on you. We won’t know for years, IMO.
CarnalK, I got your joke. 
I was going to say:
Or something to that effect. But now that it’s been belabored, I guess it wouldn’t be funny any more. If it ever were.
But hey, I got to tell it anyway, just by wrapping it in this little story. So there.
Post-polio syndrome can also afflict people who had asymptomatic polio, and SSPE is a rare but universally fatal sequela to measles. Both usually strike decades after the original infection.
I just hope nothing like that happens here.
I guessed it was a joke. Yay, me! (I didn’t laugh though.)
This is scary.
Guy dies from blood clot in lung artery two weeks after recovering from COVID-19.
He was 41 years old.