80% of positive cases are asymptotic

BBQ4Me

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8:27a, 7/7/20

AG

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53320155

From the British Office for National Statistics.

Kinda scary that the asymptomatic spread is that high. It seems like they should start encouraging everyone to get tested (and potentially on a semi-regular basis). Though the idea of the "brain tickle swab" is not very appealing...

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Player To Be Named Later

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In reply to BBQ4Me • 8:28a, 7/7/20

AG

BBQ4Me said:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53320155

From the British Office for National Statistics.

Kinda scary that the asymptomatic spread is that high. It seems like they should start encouraging everyone to get tested (and potentially on a semi-regular basis). Though the idea of the "brain tickle swab" is not very appealing...

Yeah, no way people are going to sign up to do that just for grins much less on any sort of regular basis..

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Keegan99

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In reply to BBQ4Me • 8:35a, 7/7/20

AG

Quote:
Kinda scary that the asymptomatic spread is that high.

This metric - the number of asymptomatic individuals testing positive - does not say anything about asymptomatic spread, though the article points to it as a boogeyman.

Researchers are fairly confident that that the majority of the infected individuals don't transmit to anyone else. That is, transmission is not homogeneous. It follows a power rule, where a minority of the cases are responsible for the bulk of the transmission.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all

Quote:
"But we are certainly seeing a lot of concentrated clusters where a small proportion of people are responsible for a large proportion of infections." But in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. "Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread," Kucharski says.

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BDub3

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12:59p, 7/7/20

AG

80% are asymptomatic on the date of their test, per the article. Wonder what the asymptomatic number is 2 weeks after their test. Gotta be lower than 80%. Still will probably be pretty high though, which is good news.

amercer

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1:06p, 7/7/20

AG

Unfortunately we still don't know **** about this virus. So the chances that something published today ends up being wrong are pretty high, and that goes double for things published months ago.

The pandemic will be long over before we really answer all the questions about it's spread.

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