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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: 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.