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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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

if 50% to 75% of cases are asymptomatic that means 25% to 50% are symptomatic.

I'm not taking the exact 75% number here in the following - but close, and I will do some hasty approximations.

Current total cases (maybe off by some hours) is 80,894.

80894 is 20.2% of 400000.

400000 - 80000 = 320000.

So yes, given the article's premises 320000 is pretty much on the optimistic side for humanity.

on edit: but once again my math is probably off somewhere so correct it if you see some glaring error in my reasoning. Also note these numbers are for China, of course.

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

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> Unless you are in a risk group, the test doesn’t really make a difference. If the test is positive, you can self-quarantine and notify everyone you've been in contact with that they need testing . Then any one of those people that tests positive can do the same thing, etc. etc. If you don't do any testing, you end up with a bunch of positive but asymptomatic carriers wandering around unknowingly infecting other peo…

Jup, but they are already at their test capacity so they already need to priorize who is beeing tested.

So unless you have the lab infrastructure in place already (I don't know how it is in Japan), you can't really invent it out of thin air in the midst of a crisis.

The truth is that neoliberal ideology all around the globe did its best to make hospitals and health systems "more economic" by cutting (at the time) unneeded capacities, without any real concern about the resillience of the system as a whole. This is (aside from timing and culture) where you see the main difference between nations today. This is e.g. why Spain decided the privatization of their hospitals was a grave mistake.

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

#454

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.

> What no one is talking about is how much social distancing/isolation is needed to avoid hospital saturation.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

People are talking about it, that talk is driving policy, and the answer is “with some local adjustments possible based on caseload, until there is an effective vaccine developed and deployed, which will probably be 18+ months”, and the alternative is a truly catastrophic number of fatalities.

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

#455
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless you are in a risk group, the test doesn’t really make a difference. If the test is positive, you can self-quarantine and notify everyone you've been in contact with that they need testing . Then any one of those people that tests positive can do the same thing, etc. etc. If you don't do any testing, you end up with a bunch of positive but asymptomatic carriers wandering around unknowingly infecting other peo…

Indeed and it probably makes much of the difference why active cases in Korea have kind of leveled off while in Europe they are growing about 25%/day. And just a reminder that's 800x a month.

Is it possible for the number of cases counted to go up simply because more testing is occurring, while the number of people with the virus has leveled off?

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

#456
post #48

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…

I don't see in that link where it shows the CFR in the U.S. changing at all, let alone dramatically. Here's a paper from 2013 that surveyed CFR reports for H1N1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/ After a long discussion about the varying definitions of the numerator and denominator, they had this to say: > Given that estimates of the infection fatality risk are unlikely to be available early enoug…

Knowing the actual CFR allows us to set the right policy. The seasonal flu has a range of 0.10 and 0.015% CFR. At what point do we shut down society? 0.4% 0.6%?

And I know this will get me down=voted, but what if COVID-19 is everywhere already and it turns out the CFR to be close, or even lower than influenza?

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

#457
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday the news was that anybody over 80 is not treated. They simply don't have the capacity for it, and survival chances are better for people under 80.

It's not a rule i've read on any Italian report. There was a doctor in Bergamo who said that they might have to do that in an interview and it was misreported in the international media. (I'm Italian living abroad) the Italian healthcare system is regularly listed in the top 10 in the world and Lombardy is usually number 1 in Italy. They are building a massive facility in one of the exhibition centers in Milan, it's…

Then i probably read the misreported quote. I'm Danish, and despite having lived in northern italy for a few years, i sadly don't speak/read italian :)

As Italy is "3 weeks" ahead of us, news from there is being monitored closely as it could signal what might happen here.

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

#458
post #434
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 suspect the reason for fewer tests is, as many have pointed out, because of a lack of tests rather than overt political malfeasance. Note: Yesterday they performed 3.4k tests,[0] which is aprox 30% of the total tests to date in a single day. Tests are ramping up as supplies come online. [0] https://covid19japan.com/

The government says they can perform around 7,500 test a day. However, the total number of tests are much lower than that. Please see the data below. https://toyokeizai.net/sp/visual/tko/covid19/en.html

3/17 is kind of an outlier, because there were too many tests for those who were in close contact with suspected carriers.

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

#459
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people in the saturated hospitals know what's going on. HN or Reddit had nothing to do with that.

> saturated hospitals citation needed. PS: you should easily be able to cite that statement in favor or in disfavor of your statement. Both citations will be equally valid and invalid.

> citation needed

It would be ridiculous to copy here the URL of all newspapers and TV channels in Europe. You can also easily find doctors and other personal in hospitals saying they are over capacity. You can also see how in China they had to build new hospitals.

If you need me to give you a citation to understand that this is a huge shitstorm for our health systems you are just stupid.

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

#460
Occam's Razor would imply that the "asymptomatic non-transmissive" cases are really just false positives. The only work I've seen on false positives is these guys, who estimate the FP rate for the active nucleic acid test screening at 75% chance of there being a 'false positive rate' greater than 47%.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32133832/?fbclid=IwAR3LHLplR...

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