What value does knowing the total number of asymptomatic cases provide today? Such data is doubtlessly invaluable for studying the virus, but it's unnecessary t

What value does knowing the total number of asymptomatic cases provide today? Such data is doubtlessly invaluable for studying the virus, but it's unnecessary today for managing the outbreak. Yes, the data can help us more accurately estimate the rate of infections, but that'll take months or years to pin down to the precision that such fine-grained data promises. In the mean time, you can roughly determine the spread of impactful cases by the change in number of presentations of respiratory infections, just as we've done for decades. You characterize what they're doing as stonewalling, but I'm charactering it as prioritizing. The biggest priority is collecting data on severe cases, and generally following established protocol to minimize unforced errors. The number of asymptomatic cases doesn't help you figure out how many ventilators you might need, at least not in a timely manner. The middle of an epidemic is not the time to revolutionize the practice and science of medicine. If you don't think things through carefully--i.e. the impact of false negatives and false positives of assay kits--you can easily fsck things up. Researchers want data, but the primary concern right now is juggling medical resources and finding treatments. More data is not always helpful, especially data not directly relevant to the present task. You're also assuming that hospitals and doctors are itching to run assay kits on every suspected case. Why, because some nurse's complaints went viral on social media? To out-do Singapore? Because "more data"? Doctors not interested in running millions of assay kits aren't going to be the ones complaining, not unless you forced them to run the tests. An assay result won't change the way you treat a patient with characteristic signs of a severe respiratory infection in the middle of a global SARS outbreak.