3 ms·
Furthermore, the author essentially says: "4% is low and can be neglected", but gives no reason why that number is supposed to be low. It reads like gut feeling
by WA 3y ago
Furthermore, the author essentially says: "4% is low and can be neglected", but gives no reason why that number is supposed to be low. It reads like gut feeling.
Think about it: you have a room of 100 people, 4 of them might be asymptomatic spreaders. From what we observed during the pandemic, there were super spreader events, where one person infected hundreds of others. 4% doesn’t seem irrelevant.
- civilized 3y agoAgreed. Also, our understanding at the time was that people were spreading it in the days before developing symptoms. Does the Stanford study adequately sample that population? We have no idea, because this study wasn't designed to answer questions about asymptomatic spread. All they did was run a special PCR test on a convenience sample of people they had lying around in the hospital, and report the results they got from that. Maybe most of those people were post-symptomatic, which would explain why they had a lot of dead virus lying around to be collected in the swabs. If these findings had revolutionary implications, they could have been surfaced at the time. Other people at Stanford had no issue broadcasting their opinions and getting heard.
- ethanbond 3y agoNot to mention that even standard testing wasn’t scaled up adequately in the time period in question. A better test would’ve been better, but we couldn’t even get the less-good test rolled out at scale in 2020. It’s irritating to have to rehash these fairly moonshot-in-retrospect ideas when there is ample unambiguous, generally useful low-hanging fruit: hospitals should not run out of PPE; schools & hospitals should have excellent air filtration systems; tests, once developed, should be able to occupy nearly all relevant manufacturing capacity immediately
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoHow can an asymptomatic spreader, that is without sneezing/coughing, effectively infect 100s of people? That’s never made sense to me.
- unterdenlinden 3y agoThey just need to infect one superspreader
- eynsham 3y agoForced ventilation might do it.
- civilized 3y agoIt's about the size of the water droplets needed to transmit the virus. If big ones are required, you need close contact and/or sneezing/coughing. If smaller droplets are sufficient, other vigorous oral activities like singing or excited close-quarters talking could spread the virus more effectively (choirs and professional conferences were important superspreader events in the early pandemic). Or maybe even just being together for long periods of time in unfavorable ventilation conditions. In my recollection, epidemiological case studies have suggested that being together in unfavorable ventilation was the biggest risk factor overall. There were papers that looked at people's status, contacts over time, the rooms they were together in, and the ventilation conditions, all in a very detailed way and basically inferred the exact course of transmission between specific individuals.
- ToValueFunfetti 3y agoI think your point still stands, but it's not 4% of the general population. If you have a room of 100 people with asymptomatic COVID, it wouldn't matter if any of them are spreaders; there wouldn't be anyone to spread to. I have no idea how you could determine the prevalence of asymptomatic COVID though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]