4 ms·
> data on the shedding of infectious virus in asymptomatic individuals are too scarce to quantify their transmission potential in order to inform policy on quar
by sradman 6y ago
> data on the shedding of infectious virus in asymptomatic individuals are too scarce to quantify their transmission potential in order to inform policy on quarantine duration in the absence of testing.
This has long been a key question: how much of community transmission is due to truly asymptotic individuals? Michael Mina style Lick-a-Stick daily tests could answer this question and remove the potential errors surrounding symptom self-assessment.
- nradov 6y agoThat question was answered in a study published last week. "There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
- sradman 6y agoInteresting paper but I'm not convinced that these are asymptomatic cases. I think these are primarily recovered cases that still have trace amounts of non-infectious viral RNA. The originally linked Lancet paper makes a distinction between "viral shedding" and "viral RNA shedding". I think the unanswered question involves individuals in the first week of their newly acquired infection (EDIT: after the incubation period). I hope that doesn't come across as nit picking; the scale and scope of the Wuhan study is impressive but an equivalent study is needed in an area with ongoing community transmission.