The question of whether you can get sick from someone with the virus who is asymptomatic is still not close to being settled, as far as I can see. I think it is safe to say that settling this question would make for much better-informed decisions by individuals and policy makers.
[UPDATE: Consider this study (pointer from a reader) vs. this study (pointer from a commenter).] One says that asymptomatics have as much viral load as symptomatics. The other says that there were no cases of asymptomatic transmission in their sample.]
The question could be settled by running experiments. You could find people who test positive for the virus and are asymptomatic. You could find volunteers willing to expose themselves to these asymptomatic folks under various conditions. Then you could evaluate the results.
I have been saying since the early days of March and April that we need this sort of science. But epidemiologists and public health “experts” do not think the way I do. As far as I am concerned, the call to “follow the science” is baloney sandwich. There is no science to follow.
Despite lacking such valuable information we should act like we do with all other respiratory pathogens. That it is not assuming that we are all potential asymptomatic virus transmitters but instead urging people with symptoms to keep their contacts to a minimum or to use proper protective equipment.
Germany’s chief virologist and gov. advisor (C. Drosten) gave out the mantra that we should all act like we are infectious. If someone in 2019 would have said he assumes everyone to be infectious for some disease he would have been committed to a psychiatric ward.
The question of whether you can get sick from someone with the virus who is asymptomatic is still not close to being settled, as far as I can see.
Can you post some references on the subject? My major problem in researching this is culling the worthwhile sources from the FUD, opinion manipulation, and people “boosting the signal” of such.
I would say it is pretty close to being settled, have you seen this paper? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
Although it won’t do you much good right now, as there seems to be plenty of symptomatic spread.
Money quote, “A total of 1174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they *all* tested negative for the COVID-19.”
Pretty strong evidence that asymptomatics *don’t* spread the disease.
This makes sense. If one doesn’t have symptoms, one’s body is knocking out the virus early, not making a bunch more copies in the linings of one’s respiratory tract, and not coughing it out in aerosolized droplets, or shedding it in spittle from lots of loud talking or singing in close proximity to other people (i.e., the church choir cases.)
In other words, the basic model for the germ theory of disease and spread for respiratory infections.
Implication: Open the schools, daycares, etc. All of them, immediately. The kids are all right, and very, very low risk for spreading the disease to relatives or teachers.
*That* would be “following the science”. Instead we get “following the panic”.
Meanwhile, in the red states…
1) Out first grader gets to attend school in-person each day. She loves it.
2) new, hip Italian restaurant/market called Eataly opens tomorrow in Dallas. We will visit on Friday.
3) NFL games are allowed here with attendees in the stands. No games allowed in California even with an empty stadium.
4) Enjoyed a memorable family trip to Disney World in August.
Texas, Georgia, Florida, etc. They had the cojones to try something different. Thank you for being “anti-science.”
Thanks. Read also the supplementary notes in
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-020-19802-w/MediaObjects/41467_2020_19802_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
in particular note 2.
Some studies prior to the recent 0/1,174 in Nature:
1/15 Park, S. et al.
0/24 Hu, Z., et al.
0/300 Wuhan testing
0/466 Ming G., et al.
So a thorough scrutiny of the literature is the only way to get an idea of what we know about covid, or anything else’s for that matter. Quite a comment on what passes for a news media these days.
Yes, and it is pathetic.
Fauci said at the outset of this mess that asymptomatic transmission wasn’t a thing and couldn’t be a thing on the grounds that asymptomatic transmission hasn’t, not even a little bit, been a feature of any virus experienced by humankind, ever. I struggle to believe that it is prevalent simply because the current estimate of 25% (thereabouts) of Londoners having had the virus is surely far too low. Even by modern urban standards Londoners are are up in each other’s faces as a matter of mundane habit and the UK locked down late compared with others.
Bret Weinstein said on Joe Rogan that he thinks asymptomatic transmission, if it is prevalent, adds weight to the notion that this virus was created in a lab and escaped (or was freed). He says it has many weird features which are not normal in respiratory viruses, not even earlier coronaviruses.
Public health ”””experts””” and ”””bioethicists””” won’t allow such studies, because they put the test subjects at risk, and the test subjects cannot meaningfully ”””consent””” to such experimental procedure. Of course, nobody every asked people to consent to the game rules set out by the ”””experts”””, or, for that matter, rest of so called social contract.
The excessive emphasis on the importance of consent was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes ever made in the history of ethics.
Even so, I can’t follow why consent would be a roadblock in this case. People regularly consent to put themselves and/or others at fairly severe risk of harm, often without good reason (e.g. driving drunk).
This is related to the so called Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: if you recognize a problem and interact with it in any way, you are now responsible for it.
This explains why it’s fine for phase 3 vaccine trial to wait months until 200 people are infected, and it’s not fine for researchers to deliberately try to infect people in both experiment and control group until you get 200 of them infected. The outcome of both is exactly the same, but in the latter case, researchers had been involved in the infection so they are culpable. In the former approach, vaccine is delayed by many months, and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths occur as a result, but that’s okay, because the vaccine researchers weren’t involved in those, so it’s totes ethical.
This is not to say that I think that we should all be consequentialist — I generally hold philosophy of ethics in rather low regard, as a bunch of post hoc rationalizations of what people feel is right deep in their hearts (with the except of people like Peter Singer, who hold on strongly to what their moral theories say despite conflicting with pre-theoretical intuitions; those people are dangerous crazies, and should never be given any political power). However, I cannot see how the current vaccine testing protocol is morally right according to *any* major ethical theory. It’s wrong in consequentialist terms, it’s wrong in utilitarian terms, it’s wrong in virtue terms. I guess it’s right in deontological terms if you treat FDA regulations as the set of highest normative rules, taking precedence above all else, in which case you’re dangerous crazy that should never have any power.
My trust in experts and elites has never been so low as it is now.
It seems odd to me that as a society we’re perfectly fine paying people to risk their life to protect the common good when it comes to the military but not for a pandemic.
Landing at D-Day was far more dangerous to your average 19 year old soldier than exposing a 19 year old today to COVID, and yet I suspect very few people would consider the American fight against Nazi Germany unethical. And many of those soldiers were drafted!
Exactly.
And when there is a science to follow, politicians and phony intellectuals ignore it. It’s hard to find an exceptional politician that would do it when it hurts his personal interest in grabbing power and accumulating wealth (indeed, no rotten and corrupt democrat is an exception and each of them is a good example of the dominant standard –they look like competing among them about who is the most mendacious and hypocrite democrat).
Now, about phony intellectuals. Take the case of Paul Krugman. In his latest NYT column “Learn to stop worrying and love debt” he pushes for large and continuous federal deficits “now” that (real) interest rates are zero or negative. His arguments are focused on how phony Republicans had been about debt-financed deficits but never mentions Econ 101’s basic assumption of scarcity and its implications –one being that nobody, individually or collectively, can borrow forever (much less when the deficit is to finance the private consumption of the party’s constituencies).
An hour ago I was reminded of phony Paul when I read an interview with an old, Argentinian friend about what is happening in our home country. My friend (Ph.D. UChicago) was arguing that in 2021 if the government couldn’t keep the deficit at less than 4% of GDP, inflation would quickly turn into hyperinflation (in Argentina, regardless of its size the deficit will have to be financed by the inflation tax). The interesting question for anyone that reads about the Argentinian economy today is why the government cannot continue borrowing from any source. The answer is quite simple: because it has already borrowed too much and exhausted all sources of credit. Please, don’t tell me that the U.S. is different.
Apropos of “When there is no science to follow,” the linked post on “Rational Choice for a COVID Christmas” might be of interest, referencing the ongoing American media campaign against Thanksgiving and Christmas because – you know – COVID…
https://naimisha_forest.silvrback.com/the-rational-choice-of-a-covid-christmas
+1
“To blame the experts is to miss the point, though. The epidemiology of pandemics is as soft science as economics or climatology. It is lousy at predictions because pandemics, like the macroeconomy and the climate, are incredibly complicated. Thus it’s hard to blame Dr. Fauci for his inevitable mistakes and flip-flops, though you should fault him for claiming to know more than he does.
Our managerial-expert class not only knows less than it claims; its approach to COVID policy is despotic in spirit. It mostly rejects trade-offs between costs and benefits, compromise or balancing one set of interests against another.”
I’m so tired of being a lay person looking at medical stuff.
” whether you can get sick from someone with the virus who is asymptomatic”
This is a fine question, but I recall reading that there is another category.
Pre-symptomatic. No symptoms, infectious, and then they get symptoms. Too.
After infecting others.
The need for experiments for data remains large, tho perhaps not quite as much as back in March. But there’s already been huge econ damage based on decisions without good data.
And I’ll continue to take D supplements, despite reading that maybe sunlight for D is better than tablets. It’s cold & gray outside, seldom sunny now.