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posted by martyb on Friday April 09 2021, @01:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the hidden-in-plain-sight dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:19AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @07:19AM (#1135231)

    Actually if many are asymptomatic, that drives the death rate down.

    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?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:06AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:06AM (#1135628)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @01:56AM (#1135871)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11 2021, @07:32PM (#1136106)

        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.