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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) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:12PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:12PM (#1135745)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Saturday April 10 2021, @09:07PM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 10 2021, @09:07PM (#1135808)

    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.