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More Than Half of People With Strong Covid Infection are Asymptomatic, New Figures Show

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

MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for TheMightyBuzzard

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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Original Submission

• Re:I told you knuckleheads (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @08:46AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 09 2021, @08:46AM (#1135238)

  and that's why vaccination also helps prevent the spread to unvaccinnated people.

  Not necessarily. This isn't proven yet for any of the covid-19 vaccines being used. Some vaccines on some people could just make them more like those asymptomatic people who still shed lots of viruses.

  It may well be that some covid-19 vaccinations reduce spread and others don't. See the case of the whooping cough vaccines for an example:
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150624071018.htm [sciencedaily.com]

  The problem is, the newer vaccines might not block transmission. A January 2014 study in PNAS by another research team demonstrated that giving baboons acellular pertussis vaccines prevented them from developing symptoms of whooping cough but failed to stop transmission.

  Building on that result, Althouse and Scarpino used whopping cough case counts from the CDC, genomic data on the pertussis bacteria, and a detailed epidemiological model of whooping cough transmission to conclude that acellular vaccines may well have contributed to -- even exacerbated -- the recent pertussis outbreak by allowing infected individuals without symptoms to unknowingly spread pertussis multiple times in their lifetimes.

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