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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

#341

Post by medbrane »

rickyc091 wrote: post #209
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.

It's useless in the sense that you can still contract the virus with a mask. Let's say they are using the surgeon's mask, someone can sneeze and it can get in through the side. The n95 has a better seal so that can prevent it, but what if someone sneezes and it gets into your eye. I would say some protection is better than nothing, but don't assume you will be protected from coronavirus 100%.

>but don't assume you will be protected from coronavirus 100%.

Washing hands does not protects you 100% so why bother?

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

#342

Post by dm319 »

netsharc wrote: post #292
warabe wrote: 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…

Capacity of testing is a major issue, and as cases increase, turn around goes down. Tests have to be used where they will be useful and influence management.

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

#343

Post by surfsvammel »

I have shortness of breath, cannot go up the stairs in our house without having to stop and rest. 37 years old and otherwise quite healthy. Have underlying autoimmune disease, and am on immunomod. Coughing and light fever. I’ve had this for 5 days. When I called the hospital they told me to come in and get tested, but when I came to the hospital they did not test me.

The doctor told me, it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. No matter what the test would show he would tell me the same thing: go home, isolate yourself, and come back if your fever worsens.

Once your area reach a certain number of persons affected, there is little use to try to track each one. When they have changed to a strategy of trying to protect the weak, and just slow down the spread. Testing doesn’t really add much value or information.

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

#344

Post by MadSudaca »

warabe wrote: 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…

What would you change if you take the test and come positive?

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

#345

Post by yardstick »

MadSudaca wrote: post #344
warabe wrote: 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…

What would you change if you take the test and come positive?

Gut instinct:

- More likely to strictly adhere to the lockdown - Post recovery / quarantine period, if (big IF) you now have immunity and aren’t risking infecting others anymore, you could be more productive in the world.

- Helping others with their food/supplies/whatever. Heck, even spending more money on take out food which helps the economy.

The idea of building up a herd immunity seems to me to require knowing who has the immunity so we know when we have enough.

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

#346

Post by sveng »

learnstats2 wrote: post #323
leftyted wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the government is correctly rationing tests. My sense is that the vast majority of the healthy population shouldn't get tested even if they might have the virus because the infrastructure doesn't support widespread testing (anywhere -- as far as I know). They should act as if they have the virus and stay home, rest, drink a lot of water, and take NSAIDs if the pain gets out of hand. I've been sick since l…

current advice is: DON'T take NSAIDs (e.g. ibuprofen), which may cause complications due to interaction with immune system. do take paracetamol

aka Tylenol (acetaminophen) in the USA. Consult your doctor. Not sure what this means for children, but this directive against NSAIDs is a really important development in treatment protocols for COVID-19.

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

#347

Post by jeremysalwen »

logicallee wrote: post #201
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…

>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…

So I guess the South Korean CFR of 0.7%, with by far the best testing, a relatively young population, and no overloading of hospitals, is "way under 1%"? And any suggestion that a higher percentage of people died in other circumstances is just a "false number"?

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

#348

Post by easytiger »

vonmoltke wrote: post #285
woah wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn’t the hospital system collapse because of the flu?

Based on the CDC's numbers for the US[1], less than 2% of seasonal flu cases require hospitalization at all. This disease is at about 20% (based on detected infections). Even if 75% of infections are really undetected and asymptomatic, we're still looking at about 3 times the number of hospitalizations as seasonal flu. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

This doesn't make sense.

The flu figures are statistically derived. The cv2 figure is derived from literally actual test cases only, which represent a tiny tiny tiny subset.

They cannot surely be compared, unless I'm missing something

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

#349

Post by nostrademons »

mateo411 wrote: post #264
bart_spoon wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why there would be any reason to believe that would be the case. Generally viruses become less deadly over time, not more. The Spanish flu was an outlier.

I'm pretty sure the Spanish flu did become less deadly over time. I'm sure the virus didn't go away after the second wave, however humanity started developing an immunity to it.

Right, the swine flu pandemic of 2009 was basically a descendant of Spanish Flu. It continues to circulate, particularly in the last couple years - a majority of flu cases this last couple months have been the H1N1 strain that descends from Spanish Flu. We don't hear about it because newer and more deadly pathogens like COVID-19 have cropped up since.

I think most people in this thread are talking about 1918-1919, though, since that time period's a little more relevant for predicting what COVID-19 will do.

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

#350

Post by postalrat »

andrewseanryan wrote: post #286

This article on hacker news a couple of days ago could explain a lot of this. There is a possibility that a very large number of the asymptomatic positive tests are in fact false-positives. This could be good news for the world, but I'm not betting on that yet. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32133832 .

Wouldn't it be great news if so many are asymptomatic or mild? It might explain why China seems to have so few current cases given its population. Maybe many people have already caught it and now have some form of immunity.
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