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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @04:41AM (5 children)
If I'm reading this correctly, 53% of people with covid don't even know it. But that number comes from the results of people who were actually tested. If you don't have symptoms you're not just going to walk in and get tested for no reason. So the number of asymptomatic infections will be higher. Much higher. How much higher? What if 90% of the population has covid and we don't even know it.
Wouldn't that make the percentage of people who "die" from covid vs the number of people who have it (and don't have symptons) less than a statistical rounding error?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Booga1 on Friday April 09 2021, @05:00AM
I don't think that's what they're saying.
I think what they're saying is: "Of the people who tested positive for COVID and had no symptoms, 53% of them had a high enough viral load to be considered a 'strong positive.'"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kazzie on Friday April 09 2021, @05:02AM (2 children)
The ONS are doing their own weekly random testing of individuals; this is separate from people who contact their health service and ask for a test. They've been doing this for almost a year now, with the expressed aim of estimating the proportion of the whole population that's infected. Their methodology was designed specifically to deal with the self-selection issues you've outlined.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday April 09 2021, @06:56AM (1 child)
ps: my family is on the ONS scheme. We got tested every week for the first couple of months, now we get tested every month. A nice person comes round our house and asks a few questions about what we have been up to - e.g. "have you had any social contacts in the last week, have you been wearing a mask, etc etc" and we each do a nose and throat swab which goes off to the lab for testing. They send us a letter each month saying "negative".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @01:15PM
My employer (large University) has been doing PCR tests for all faculty, staff, and students twice a week since August 2020. They wanted to know exactly where the cases are (even asymptomatic) so they could try to do real contact tracing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:26PM
At my kids school, if you're exposed and salaried you're kicked out for two weeks and nobody takes a test to come back earlier. If you're hourly like almost all the support staff and teachers aides then you have a huge economic incentive to take a free test and come back to work a week earlier.
Policies change on a roughly monthly basis but that seems to be roughly recently correct.