Posted on 04/05/2020 10:54:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
New evidence has emerged from China indicating that the large majority of coronavirus infections do not result in symptoms.
Chinese authorities began publishing daily figures on 1 April on the number of new coronavirus cases that are asymptomatic, with the first day’s figures suggesting that around four in five coronavirus infections caused no illness. Many experts believe that unnoticed, asymptomatic cases of coronavirus infection could be an important source of contagion.
A total of 130 of 166 new infections (78%) identified in the 24 hours to the afternoon of Wednesday 1 April were asymptomatic, said China’s National Health Commission. And most of the 36 cases in which patients showed symptoms involved arrivals from overseas, down from 48 the previous day, the commission said.
China is rigorously testing arrivals from overseas for fear of importing a fresh outbreak of covid-19.
Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist and honorary research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said the findings were “very, very important.” He told The BMJ, “The sample is small, and more data will become available. Also, it’s not clear exactly how these cases were identified. But let’s just say they are generalisable. And even if they are 10% out, then this suggests the virus is everywhere. If—and I stress, if—the results are representative, then we have to ask, ‘What the hell are we locking down for?’”
Jefferson said that it was quite likely that the virus had been circulating for longer than generally believed and that large swathes of the population had already been exposed.
Users of Chinese social media have expressed fears that carriers with no symptoms could be spreading the virus unknowingly, especially now that infections have subsided and authorities have eased curbs on travel for people in previous hotspots in the epidemic.
Zhong Nanshan, a senior medical adviser to the Chinese government, said that asymptomatic infections would not be able to cause another major outbreak of covid-19 if such people were kept in isolation. Officials have said this is usually for 14 days.
Nanshan said that once asymptomatic infected people were identified, they and their contacts would be isolated and kept under observation.
Citing classified data, the South China Morning Post said that China had already found more than 43 000 cases of asymptomatic infection through contact tracing.
The latest findings seem to contradict a World Health Organization report in February that was based on covid-19 in China. This suggested that “the proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.”1
But since that WHO report other researchers, including Sergio Romagnani, a professor of clinical immunology at the University of Florence, have said they have evidence that most people infected by the virus do not show symptoms. Romagnani led the research that showed that blanket testing in a completely isolated village of roughly 3000 people in northern Italy saw the number of people with covid-19 symptoms fall by over 90% within 10 days by isolating people who were symptomatic and those who were asymptomatic.2
In an article on the website of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, director of the centre and editor of BMJ EBM, write, “There can be little doubt that covid-19 may be far more widely distributed than some may believe. Lockdown is going to bankrupt all of us and our descendants and is unlikely at this point to slow or halt viral circulation as the genie is out of the bottle.
“What the current situation boils down to is this: is economic meltdown a price worth paying to halt or delay what is already amongst us?”3
We screwed all the stats by testing only sick folks instead of random sectionalized testing.
STOP ALREADY!
China says???? What??
WHO = China
DON’T BELIEVE THESE PEOPLE! ARE YOU NUTS?
“We screwed all the stats by testing only sick folks instead of random sectionalized testing.”
90% test negative.
Consider the source, the money flow, the deaths,
and the DEEP STATES’ long term plans:
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN1276777C/en?q=pshuttle-SN&oq=pshuttle-SN
The upcoming election caused the response to turn into a circus
Short answer, no. Because we could be using both hands to get a handle on this instead of keeping one tied behind our backs. IMO.
Yep. Serology tests shot help on the back end at least.
Why should we believe China?
And an even more basic question. Can we halt or delay it? Or are we just kidding ourselves at great cost
That means one of two things -- either it isn't too serious an infection for most people, orrrr, there's no evidence that it is asymptomatic because there hasn't been a test of the overwhelming majority of the human population, IOW, there's zero evidence that it is asymptomatic.
““We screwed all the stats by testing only sick folks instead of random sectionalized testing.”
90% test negative.
—
Both good points. The stats were screwed and even then the positive rate was very low among those tested.
Hm...let me think for a picosecond: “No!”
You mean both hands, right?
Even present testing for the existence of novel coronavirus is only done on people with the worst symptoms, which is clearly a very small portion of people who have it.
To take our ignorance even further, we have no way to do large-scale testing for antibodies, which would give us some idea of the number of people who have already had it, or how quickly they develop immunity. Such testing is a long way way, if it ever could be arranged.
Its entirely possible that a large portion of society has already been exposed to coronavirus.
Policy makers are completely flying blind with this. Its why most are defaulting to “worst case” scenarios.
So sadly true.
So much for out highly paid, centralized Disease Control operations.
We know this number. We know the rate of exponential spread. The hypothesis that this disease was spread widely before we had a clue that something was up is just not consistent with anything we know.
And yes we have evidence of asymptomatic spread, but it is probably more like 10% or 20% of the symptomatic cases, not 1000%.
Yes, it’s out and you can’t put it back in the bottle.
I would say our objective should be to not swamp the healthcare system, instead if waiting until there are no more cases.
The models say the US peak is around 15 April. Let high risk people stay at home. Non hot spot areas can go back to work.
Test as many as possible and give HCQ as prophylactic to whoever requests it from their physician.
Everywhere an American looked an item came from this country (China). Now that reliance was being threatened by a change in leadership in America which was a major consumer of those products , When Americans hailed the leaders decision to make many of them in their country. Worse yet opponents to the Chinese regime in power had its citizens protesting its policies since that change in American leadership wave the American flag and present his name when doing so. All of which presented those in power the need to destroy that leader,
Would a runaway plague created by a nation which could threaten populations of an enemy cause them to react by demanding extreme restriction of movement by its population to prevent its spread ? Thus wind up fragmenting its economy.
The way this whole thing developed starting with the Italian fashion industry areas controlled by the Chinese commies hit by a runaway CoVid19. Sure looks suspicious particularly when crews of naval vessels somehow wind up being infected by it.
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