I posted the following comment on a very similar Reuters article about asymptomatic rates on an aircraft carrier 8 days ago (on a Friday):
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IMHO, this article is intentionally misleading. The incubation period is currently estimated to be 2-14 days (mean is 5.6 days per CDC, similar per WHO). The article doesn’t mention any dates or time frames, but does mention:
”Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19” — note how “so far” is ambiguous in that sentence. It also states, “The Navy’s testing of the entire 4,800-member crew of the aircraft carrier - which is about 94% complete...”, which seems to indicate nowhere near enough time has elapsed to draw any sort of conclusion.
This paper [1] found that testing of all pregnancy patients in a hospital yielded 34% asymptomatic cases. That number drops to 8% “shortly after discharge”, and could be lower than 8% (Again, no timeframe is stated).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258993332...
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If you just s/navy/prisons/ and s/[navy figures]/[prison figures] (and forgive my oversimplification of RegEx captures), I think that comment works just as well here.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, does this seem like a campaign of misinformation by omission? Or perhaps I’m being overly critical?
The key issue I take with both articles is that they speculate a lot, but gloss over the fact that no timeframes are provided to determine what percentage could actually be asymptomatic and never develop symptoms vs. simply being pre-symptomatic at the time of testing.
If the article were focused on how quickly this virus can spread in closed quarters, that would be one thing. But this rather lengthy article only has one sentence in the middle that even mentions asymptomatic cases eventually developing symptoms:
“Some people diagnosed as asymptomatic when tested for the coronavirus, however, may go on to develop symptoms later, according to researchers.”
Also, this article mentions testing asymptomatic prisoners (universal testing), but it doesn’t say why these specific prisons where chosen first. Perhaps some had at least one positive test result? If so, wouldn’t the close quarters explain most of the relatively high rates of asymptomatic positives reported, given the (initially) exponential curve of spread over time?