SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
More than half of people with strong Covid infection are asymptomatic, new figures show:
More than half of people with a strong Covid infection did not report any of the major symptoms, new figures from the Office for National Statistics have revealed.
This underlines the risk of people spreading the virus without knowing they are infected which is thought to be one of the main ways the coronavirus pandemic has been able to spread so easily around the world.
The ONS said 53 per cent of people with a strong positive, or high viral load, between December and March did not report having any symptoms compared to 47 per cent who did. It excluded patients likely to be at the start of their infection when transmission and symptoms are thought to be less likely.
Fatigue, headache and cough were the most commonly reported symptoms amongst people who had a strong positive test for Covid-19.
[...] "Around half of those we tested did not report any symptoms even whilst having high levels of the virus present in their body. This underlines that people in the community may unknowingly have the virus and potentially transmit it to others."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday April 09 2021, @02:36AM (13 children)
It kills less than 0.1% of the people infected. If you're doing "N.M billion people on earth", it's not even a rounding error.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:57AM (4 children)
Actually if many are asymptomatic, that drives the death rate down.
Likely that affect on the "cited statistics" will not be factored in.
This also strengthens the argument to protect those at risk and
let most others live their lives and get to herd immunity.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:19AM (3 children)
But not down from 0.1%. Let's consider real numbers this time, instead of the ones from TMB's ass: 3% confirmed IFR [worldometers.info] * 47% of cases symptomatic [soylentnews.org] still means it kills 1.5% of cases, so TMB is off by one order off magnitude. Which is actually pretty low error for his ass, we've seen worse,
And of course, the above assumes that all of the non-symptomatic cases never get a Covid test, which is obviously untrue as per this story. So let's be charitable and assume that the non-symptomatic positives from this story are the only ones to ever get a positive Covid test without having symptoms, and TMB's 0.1% figure is accurate: given that Covid has already killed 0.2% of USians [worldometers.info], that must mean the entire population has been infected twice already on average, which conclusively proves that reinfection does occur. Widely. So what are we vaccinating for?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:06AM (2 children)
If you break that down further though: the UK doesn't compare to the US. One state to the next doesn't necessarily compare well, in many aspects but of special consideration is health (e.g. diabetes incidence by state can double). A second point to be made is selected sample, I can't find methodology, it just seems like random population sampling - which is good for us. We'll discount the huge breach of social difference between US and UK. Now let's talk about fatalities: the information I'm pulling from ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge [cdc.gov] ) shows fatality to be approximately 4.4% for people below the age of 50, 50-64 appears to hold the turning point, that particular age group has an increased risk, ~15% of total fatalities. 64+ holds 80%. This is reasonably well known in any case. What it illustrates, and why I'm reviewing it, is that COVID19 alone seldom inflicts fatalities. That COVID19 increases the incidence of fatality in groups that are quite probably equally susceptible to expiry due to a host of diseases. We can't realistically attribute fatality solely to COVID19. It is in fact increasing the likelihood of death, but we need to look at base rates of every complicating illness and the difference between then and with COVID19. And then we could approximate the disparities. What I would conjecture you would find is a relatively small increase in the probability of fatality when compared directly against diabetes fatalities pre-pandemic, a 7-8% risk multiplier against diabetes alone which killed ~150k people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:56AM (1 child)
The simplest way to get a baseline is to compare the death rate for the same group in 2020 vs 2010-2019. If the claimed death rate for COVID-19 matches with the deviation from previous years then it is likely accurate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:32PM
This doesn't work. Lots of things are changing. Dramatically increased death rates from deaths of despair (drugs, suicide, etc), flu deaths nonexistent, motor vehicle deaths way down, etc, etc, etc. And as people eat themselves into even bigger blobs, cardiovascular deaths will increase imminently if they haven't already.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by choose another one on Friday April 09 2021, @03:03PM (3 children)
> It kills less than 0.1% of the people infected
Pick a mid sized currently covid-prevalent country, lets say Czech Republic (Czechia), lets look at the deaths:
Ok, fatalities 27617, population 10.65m - check e.g. worldometers, or ourworldindata or the EU situation update.
10million should be big enough real world test sample size, right?
Problem is, that is more than 0.25% _whole population_ fatality rate - or in other words, if your numbers are correct, everyone in Czech Republic has had it over 2.5 times, in a year.
So, either it is a lot deadlier than you say, or it is as you say but you get infected several times a year with 0.1% chance of dying _each_ time.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:12PM (1 child)
You can analyze it on a macro scale. Ignore the covid thing and pretend we haven't invented the germ theory of disease yet etc.
For the last 40 years the total death rate in the USA has been in the 8-10 range. Last year 2020 we finished around 9.7
So where's my pandemic at? I don't disbelieve for a second that 90+ year old people are dying of lung infections, they've been doing that for decades. I mean where's my end of the world zombie pandemic I was promised?
Supposedly Feb 2019 had 233195 USAians die and Feb 2020 had 295084 die. So last February when the talking heads were saying not to wear masks and its no big deal, an extra 61889 people died that month before covid was supposedly here and a serious threat.
Supposedly Nov 2019 had 277986 USAians die and Nov 2020 had 260404. So last November when the talking heads were saying repent for the end is near, covid killed an extra negative 17582 people compared to 2019. Huh? Where my pandemic at?
Let me put it to you this way... If 53% of people with covid have NO symptoms at all, that means 53% of people killed drunk driving next month are going to show up on a COVID dashboard somewhere as having died while infected with covid. But if they're asymptomatic when they died, does it really matter?
Another interesting thought experiment. Say a "very large" nursing home has 10 people die of pneumonia per year. This year 10 people die of pneumonia, but 5 of them died with a positive antibody test result. Does that mean we have a public health emergency?
Another strange thought experiment. I had a grandfather die a quarter century ago of lung cancer. Well you know WWII gen and smoking and how that ends. He was in and out of the hospital quite a bit toward the end. Imagine if he caught covid from being in and out of contaminated hospitals for months. Well, lets face it, terminal lung cancer is why he caught covid but did he die of terminal lung cancer or covid? In the USA, Americans get 50% of their lifetime health care spending in their last couple months of life, which includes dr visits, which implies hospital transmitted covid. So essentially "everyone" who dies is going to die infected of covid. But I'm young and don't go to the hospital on a regular basis so I can't catch covid; then again I also don't smoke so whatever gets me probs wont be lung cancer.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday April 10 2021, @09:07PM
Your pandemic in excess deaths is right here, I think it displays US by default: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count [ourworldindata.org]
If the numbers aren't high enough for you, well I guess that sucks, maybe the bioweapons folk'll do a better job next time.
Biggest impact from Covid IMO has not been the deaths, it's always been the hospitalisation rate, which is far higher than flu and I get the impression it's far more resource intensive once you are in. Additionally the survival rate once hospitalised is very poor compared to anything else we are used to seeing in western-world hospitals (not for decades or a generation at least) - which I think will lead to major problems in future with medical staff and PTSD and similar, the impact on them has been huge.
On your deaths and thought experiments, the real answers are always in the death certificates which (speaking UK at least) are required to state primary and contributory causes. It's not an exact science though, in the same way that if someone with massive heart disease and a boatload of drugs in-system dies after a knee on the neck, what did he die of, the disease, the drugs or the knee? If he would have lived through the disease and drugs that day without
the knee does that mean he died of the knee? If he would have lived through the knee without the drugs does that mean it was the drugs? What if both those are true?
In the UK stats they are using a much-maligned death-within-28days-of-positive-test - but that is just for the headline death rate, the real figures are in the death certs, produced by doctors under penalty of perjury, it's just that they take several weeks to sort out so they are no use for seeing how things are _right now_ (in our real-time-data must-know-right-now world). Here's the thing - the simple estimate is still _lower_ than the figure from the death certs. Even if you take only the death certs where covid is stated as _primary_ cause of death, not just contributory.
Here's another thought experiment - if you have cancer and you go to the cancer surgeon and she says there is nothing she can do and then explains it is because there are no ICU beds for your post-op because they are full of covids, she has no anesthetist, because they are all ventilating covids, and if she could find one she has no operating theatres because they are all being used as ICUs to treat covids (something which, by the way, has never happened before in the history of the hospital). So you die of cancer, or did you actually die because of covid? - because in normal times with surgery you would have had a chance?
I know that doctor. For some people the above has not been a thought experiment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:54PM
This doesn't work, because Covid deaths are very much NOT randomly distributed. In particular it has a very near 0 mortality rate for people below the age of 65, yet it is reasonably dangerous for those above 70 with it. This is a big part of the reason that Africa has basically shrugged off COVID when early on it was expected to just completely devastate the continent.
Here [wikipedia.org] is a list of countries by median age. The youngest countries in the world are pretty much all in Africa. The youngest is a shocking 14.8 years in Niger. The Czech Republic is one of the oldest countries in the world with a median age of 43.3 - about 5 years above that of the US.
There's also the weird weather stuff. COVID gets toasted in UV, and hotter countries have generally had better results. If this turns out to be causal (and not just confounded by hotter countries being younger or whatever), then you have yet another issue you'd need to control for. The Czech Republic not only being one of the oldest, but also one of the coldest countries in the world.
The point of this being that looking at a single country is generally insufficient to assess the overall death rate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 09 2021, @03:16PM
Not if you're over 70. I'm hearing death rates of 9% in that case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @03:22PM
The brain damage this virus will do you will result in no difference for casual observer.
Some of the dumb things you say are beyond idiotic.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday April 09 2021, @03:49PM (1 child)
.1% and 2.9 million deaths would mean that almost 40% the planet has already caught covid. You sure about those numbers?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:16PM
If half the victims are asymptomatic that means the number of people who caught it is twice the number reported, at least for young healthy people (the vast majority of the population).
In my state the untrustworthy official government statistics are already well over 10% of the population. I don't think it far fetched that in other countries or other states that count might be higher like the 20% you suggest.