50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic • Hacker News Board

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#151

Post by khazhoux » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

md224 wrote: post #93

lend000 wrote: post #63

I'm not a confirmed case, but I'm a 90% sure case based on symptoms and symptoms of people I have been in close contact with, and so far the experience has been relatively mild, in the literal sense. The primary discomfort has likely been the anxiety of how the tightness in my chest might progress (which ironically can also cause chest tightness). I'm in a low risk group. I had lethargy and high fever the first day o…

> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases. This is good in that it means the death rate is also off by that factor, but bad in that there will not be enough fear/incentive for the primary carriers (young adults) to adhere to adequate social distancing. If the death rate is off by 10x-50x, isn't this approaching the death rate of seasonal influenza, in which case we didn't actually ne…

I expect an interesting side effect of all this is a reassessment of our tolerance for the "usual" influenza death rate. It's shockingly high. Could we save thousands of lives a year by people stopping going to work when they're sick, not going to grocery store when they're sick, etc?

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#152

Post by lqet » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

lend000 wrote: post #63

I'm not a confirmed case, but I'm a 90% sure case based on symptoms and symptoms of people I have been in close contact with, and so far the experience has been relatively mild, in the literal sense. The primary discomfort has likely been the anxiety of how the tightness in my chest might progress (which ironically can also cause chest tightness). I'm in a low risk group. I had lethargy and high fever the first day o…

> dry eyes

Also no confirmed case here, but I attended a conference and later got an email that one participant tested positive. Since a few days, I also have dry eyes (thought it was because of dry heating air in our apartment first, but it didn't go away for days as it normally does, not even yesterday when we did not had the heating on because of the warm weather), dry cough and I am a little tired. 2 days ago I had an aching sore throat starting in the evening, but it went away during the night and after several very strong cups of fresh hot ginger tea. Also a runny nose. Yesterday I decided to work from home, my wife also couldn't go to work because she also developed a strong dry cough Sunday evening and she decided to better stay at home. Felt a bit tired while working yesterday (and also a bit confused), so my wife suggested I might also have a light fever, but I didn't take any measurement because I really felt fine. She herself had intermittent fever the whole day yesterday, going up to 38.7 degrees Celsius (101.7 Fahrenheit), so nothing really serious and she felt fine otherwise. Our 12 month old daughter woke us up several times two nights ago with an extremely scary cough, but it didn't seemed to bother her and she continued sleeping. Yesterday morning, though, she looked quite unhappy, was still extremely tired and then basically slept for the whole day, from the morning to the late afternoon. When she woke up, she was completely happy again, no fever, no cough.

I have no idea if we have the virus, but after reading some comments here, I think there is at least a possibility. So far it was really just a nuisance, any cold I had in the last years was much, much worse. Without the media coverage, I would've just shrugged it of and continued to go to work.

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#153

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:53 AM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #148

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem everywhere. Sick leave is something you take when you have high fever or need surgery, not when you start coughing. Reasons include: there's only so much sick leave you can take, employers expect sick leave to be extremely rare and will "phase you out" if it isn't, getting a sick leave involves a visit to a doctor - which, like any visit to a healthcare facility processing sick people - comes with a ri…

> It's a problem everywhere. Sick leave is something you take when you have high fever or need surgery, not when you start coughing Do you be any experience outside the USA? Your description doesn't fit my experience in the UK and Denmark, or my general understanding of the rest of Europe. Europe will need to consider smaller changes — there are more gig economy workers than ever before, different countries have take…

I'm in Poland. We have free public healthcare and all the other nice employee privileges Europe boasts about. On paper.

In practice, most of those are guaranteed when your contract is the regular full-time one. Which is minority of jobs in Poland. To avoid paying taxes, most employers strive to employ their workers via contracts meant for part-time or gig work, or through B2B (thus we have lots of sole proprietorships "entrepreneurs" in the country). Most protections don't kick in there.

On top of that, getting a doctor's note for a runny nose is too much of a hassle, and nobody realistically does that.

Thirdly, regardless of how much worker protection your country has, day to day nobody wants to be seen as the panicky outlier at work. That's a self-limiting move, both career-wise and socially. This normalizes coming to work with potentially infectious diseases.

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#154

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #98

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem everywhere. Sick leave is something you take when you have high fever or need surgery, not when you start coughing. Reasons include: there's only so much sick leave you can take, employers expect sick leave to be extremely rare and will "phase you out" if it isn't, getting a sick leave involves a visit to a doctor - which, like any visit to a healthcare facility processing sick people - comes with a ri…

> Sick leave is something you take when you have high fever or need surgery No, you take it when you have a problem big enough that it impacts your ability to work OR when you have a contagious disease. It's a lose/lose situation for a company if a single person gets half the company sick. > there's only so much sick leave you can take, employers expect sick leave to be extremely rare and will "phase you out" In the…

More detailed response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22602990.

> Europe you can't fire someone for health reasons

On some types of contracts. Probably not the most common ones in practice. Also, making the job a living hell for someone, or laying them off the first legal opportunity arises are common practice, and I think everyone outside our industry knows it (in most industries, employers have more power than employees on the job market).

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#155

Post by jonplackett » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:57 AM UTC

Onanymous wrote: post #147

lend000 wrote: post #63

I'm not a confirmed case, but I'm a 90% sure case based on symptoms and symptoms of people I have been in close contact with, and so far the experience has been relatively mild, in the literal sense. The primary discomfort has likely been the anxiety of how the tightness in my chest might progress (which ironically can also cause chest tightness). I'm in a low risk group. I had lethargy and high fever the first day o…

> I suspect the true numbers are about 10x-50x the reported confirmed cases I came to similar conclusion just looking at the openly available numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries If you compare the number of serious cases to the number of total cases for different countries you'll get a 10x difference. Norway tests more thoroughly then the other countries, so it has a huge number of active ca…

I made a simple site to graph the daily increase figures. It only shows infections and deaths but from that you can see very different ratios for different countries.

(http://coronanalytics.com if you’re interested.)

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#156

Post by krzat » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #116

GreaterFool wrote: post #115

I keep hearing “masks are useless”. If every person who has any cough or any chest tightness or any sore throat, however mild, put on a mask, wouldn’t that stop the spread? I live in Japan. It started here earlier but didn’t explode. Nothing is closed. Business as usual. everyone wears masks. Most cases in Hokkaido. Maybe because it is much colder there and easy to overexposed and tax the immune system.

I think some of the logic behind "masks are useless" is that if people believe masks will prevent it, they'll get too reckless about going out as long as they have a mask. Sadly many people wear masks incorrectly and other people will wear masks that don't actually block viral particulates while out there acting more dangerously than otherwise, spreading disease. IIRC anything below N95 isn't going to do much, and fr…

That's very convoluted reasoning. I think the main goal of surgical masks for entire population would be to limit amount of virus floating in the air. They are also good at stopping people from touching their faces.

IMO the goverments should make masks mandatory, even if it's DYI mask made from few layers of tshirt. And start teaching people how to use them and why.

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#157

Post by rv-de » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

torpidor wrote: post #92

lend000 wrote: post #63

I'm not a confirmed case, but I'm a 90% sure case based on symptoms and symptoms of people I have been in close contact with, and so far the experience has been relatively mild, in the literal sense. The primary discomfort has likely been the anxiety of how the tightness in my chest might progress (which ironically can also cause chest tightness). I'm in a low risk group. I had lethargy and high fever the first day o…

Similarly, I'm not a confirmed case but I've been isolation since Friday just out of general precaution, and I developed a mild chest tightness while here. I was sure it wasn't covid because I didn't have a fever, but just a few hours ago I checked again and I have a borderline one (99.4). Then my girlfriend got an email that someone tested positive from the same floor in her office. I don't qualify for a test and my…

Same here, persistent mild chest pressure. My girlfriend as well as myself are experiencing it. But it's so subtle that you start to question it at times. But especially when lying in bed it becomes quite annoying or frightening if I think too much about it.

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#158

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

trymas wrote: post #133

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem everywhere. Sick leave is something you take when you have high fever or need surgery, not when you start coughing. Reasons include: there's only so much sick leave you can take, employers expect sick leave to be extremely rare and will "phase you out" if it isn't, getting a sick leave involves a visit to a doctor - which, like any visit to a healthcare facility processing sick people - comes with a ri…

> Every place on the planet needs to rethink how we handle infectious diseases. This requires both a cultural and legal shift, so that one can just not come to work when showing mild symptoms and not face any negative consequences Do I live on another planet? Coming in sick even with mild symptoms is frowned upon at least for a decade where I live. As a tech worker I can easily work remotely, so on mild symptoms I in…

As tech workers, we're particularly privileged. Ask your local grocery store clerk, or the person that handles your paperwork in the bank.

I too am from a highly-developed (relative to the US) European country. It's all nice on paper. But in practice, a lot of these legal protections are commonly evaded (and government attempts at fixing it get badmouthed by a population considering itself "not exploited proletariat, but temporarily embarrassed millionaires").

It's still much better than what Americans have, but nowhere near good enough in terms of biosafety.

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#159

Post by bronzeage » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

If a virus takes a week to develop symptoms, and doubles every 3.5 days, that's exactly what do you would expect: after a week 3/4 of the cases are new and too early to detect symptoms.

asymptomatic proportion sampled at a moment grows exponentially with incubation period, it means nothing about who will eventually develop symptoms.

Re: 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic

#160

Post by jonathanstrange » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #26

I wonder if this will be like H1N1. At first we only identified extreme cases and we had these terrifying reported fatality rates. Then we identify more and more mild or asymptomatic cases and the rates drop and drop. We’ve already seen how CFR was reported as 3 or 4%. Then on the cruise ship full of people over 60 it’s 0.7%. If there are lots of mild or asymptomatic cases it will likely be much lower. H1N1 was ident…

AFAIK, the case fatality rate is always higher than the actual mortality rate, but before reliable antibody tests are available and used on large random samples of the population speculating about it is not helpful.