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

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a paper that showed that the flu virus makes people more socialable. It was done with students who took flu vaccine. They found people socialised more after they had the vaccine (and thus, were a little bit infected) compared to before. A literature review looked at the study and came up with the negative explanation - that people felt more secure or relaxed after getting the vaccine as they felt safer. Or w…

A vaccine does not make people "a little bit infected". Vaccines are deactivated virii, so your body develops the antibodies, without any actual infection.

That's not totally true the live Polio Vaccine used a live weak infectious virus. Which had the advantage of conferring immunity to unvaccinated people. At the expense of very rarely reverting and causing full blown disease. Far as I know it's no longer being used because of that.

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

#332

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…

You're comparing a virus that early on was reported as 3-4% to one that early on was reported as 0.4%. The cruise ship and South Korea are probably closest to the true death rate of this virus. CFR in South Korea is currently around 0.8%. A common "educated guess" I see from people that work on this is its probably around 0.5%-1% assuming you can get the care needed for it.

This reflects the opinions shared by Michael Osterholm, Amesh Adalja, and Nicholas Christakis: a final case mortality of ~0.7%. But just to highlight the point, that's on a strong assumption that critical cases receive proper medical attention. I don't think that's a safe assumption for the outbreak in the United States.

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

#333
post #237

I live in Japan and I experience mild symptoms since last Wednesday but not sure if my symptom is due to Covid-19. In Japan, You have meet two conditions to take a CPR test. 1. the symptoms with fever of 37.5 degrees or more continue for 4 days or more (for the eldery and those with underlying disease, "4 days" becomes "2 days") 2. you have strong laxity (malaise) or breathlessness (dyspnea), or you have underlying d…

Isn't it the case that most countries in the world don't have enough tests, it seems only South Korea does. I live in Switzerland and they are also restricting tests to higher risk groups, and people with worse conditions (which is a bit grim, how dead do I need to be before I can get a test?) Either it's due to Olympics, or just logistics. Will the Olympics even happen if Japan is declared "OK" but many guest nation…

It's not really about how bad your symptoms get before you can get tested. It's about WHERE you are.

Coronavirus is a virus after all, just like the flu, there is no medication. You can only treat the symptoms, but not the virus itself (as opposed to a bacterial infection where you can attack the bacteria with antibiotics).

So with these undeniable facts it's fairly simple, if your symptoms are so mild that you can cure it out at home without special medical equipment like a ventilator, then you don't need testing. You just have to self isolate yourself for two weeks, get over it and afterwards you are fine and not contagious, so no way of further transmission and therefore no need to test.

If however you develop severe symptopms and need hospitalisation, then they have to test you so they know if they need to isolate you in hospital away from other patiens and protect staff or if you can get a bed amongst everyone else. That is really the only reason.

Your treatment in or outside hospital does not change at all whether you have breathing difficulties because of COVID-19 or any other influenza.

So that is it.

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

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Here is a comedy show lambasting Donald Trump for saying he had a hunch this was the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNfmTMdoao0 Donald Trump's gut probably saved thousands of Americans through closing the borders early (this is a talking point he repeats again and again and I…

I've actually been really surprised by how well he has handled this so far too. The nation-wide lockdown plus direct cash stimulus are exactly the measures I had hoped to see. Pandemics may be one of the rare situations where having authoritarian leadership can actually benefit the populace. Though I guess we have a while before it plays out completely. I have doubts about whether any non-populist president would hav…

This seems like a fairly common view to people who have come late to the topic.

If you have been paying attention for a while, the way the USA has handled this is horrifying.

Compare the outcomes in Italy to those in South Korea to see what good handling of this crisis looks like.

Even though we had the example of Italy weeks ago, we waited and waited and waited until now. Our outcomes will be similar to Italy's in a great deal of the USA.

The worst thing was the terrible, terrible failures in testing. We will never know exactly how many lives could have been saved if we ramped up testing the way South Korea did. We will be able to make some rough guesses after we get the final body count.

Trump also did enormous damage by continuously, repeatedly dismissing the new Coronavirus as no worse than the flu. Foot dragging and denial are natural anyway; having the president constantly dismiss the worst epidemic since 1918 as alarmism from whiners delayed action at the state and local levels, never mind all the action that wasn't being taken at the national level. There are still many people--maybe a majority in my area--who think this is all overblown panicking over nothing.

Here's the best I can say. The travel ban was a good idea and would have saved lives if we had not chosen to throw away the extra lead time it gave us. And most of Europe handled this just as poorly as we did, if that seems justifying to you (it does to some people).

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO predicted that 150 million people would be killed by avian flu https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2005/... Using the same logic that had lead to the severe predictions for cv19. For swine flu they promoted and stood by a CFR of 60%. Again turned out to be nonsense; nonsense known at the time to others https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555.abstract

The thing is, there's what happens if you don't contain something and what happens when you do. Humans are a monoculture across the planet at this point. In many ways it's surprising that there aren't more pandemics.

[deleted]

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

#336
post #327

During the US coronavirus task force briefing just an hour ago, one of the heads of the HHS suggested (without outright saying) that one of the reasons (just one of them) the US is lagging on testing is because they're concerned about the efficacy of tests other countries are running. High false-positive and false-negative rates were both mentioned, in "tens of thousands of tests" distributed to other countries. Ther…

>because they're concerned about the efficacy of tests other countries are running. That's rich. I understand that the US developed test had a lot more issues that the standard not-invented-here one.

And a lot of countries do the test twice, and only act on double positives or double negatives.

>doing nothing is not doing harm How can this be OK? People will spread it if they think they are not sick.

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah,and the high hospitalization and ICU rates become high case fatality rates once medical infrastructure is saturated, as well as increasing the case fatality rate for every other condition that creates a critical need for inpatient care. That's where Italy definitely is, and where it seems Iran is evn moreso (though they are less public about it.)

What no one is talking about is how much social distancing/isolation is needed to avoid hospital saturation. I ran the numbers for Canada, and it looks like we'd need isolation measures for 2+ years. I don't see how that's a feasible solution long-term.

Did you factor in an asymptomatic rate?

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

#339
post #237

I live in Japan and I experience mild symptoms since last Wednesday but not sure if my symptom is due to Covid-19. In Japan, You have meet two conditions to take a CPR test. 1. the symptoms with fever of 37.5 degrees or more continue for 4 days or more (for the eldery and those with underlying disease, "4 days" becomes "2 days") 2. you have strong laxity (malaise) or breathlessness (dyspnea), or you have underlying d…

I think there is a more reasonable explanation why they are not testing you. Simply because they wouldn’t do anything with that information anyway. If the test is positive they’ll send you home to quarantine telling you to call back if your fever worsens. If the test would show negative, they’d tell you, guess what; “please call back if your fever worsens, and stay in quarantine anyway”.

So the information doesn’t really matter.

In Sweden once they change tactics from trying to track each and every case, and who they might have gotten it from etc, to a a strategy more about just accepting that it’s spreading and trying to limit the spread in general, and protect the weak. Then they also stopped doing testing here.

Unless you are in a risk group, the test doesn’t really make a difference.

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

#340
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The disease also appears to spread much faster than the flu. So even if the death rate is comparable, the infection rate is likely to be far higher.

let's say there were 320,000 people without symptoms in China, which seems unlikely, that would make the total cases approximately 400000, and if we just looked at the fatalities so far out of that it would be a fatality rate of 0.8% iirc the common flu is 0.1% fatality, so if this only had 0.8% but affects 40-70% of the world (which seems to me like it would be at the 70% end if there are lots of asymptomatic people…

> 320,000 people without symptoms in China

Wuhan (the city, not even the entire province of Hubei) has 11 million people. Given what we know now about how virulently and covertly COVID-19 spreads and how (relatively late) Wuhan went into lockdown, how do you feel about that number?

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