Diamond Princess cruise ship: A new study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine shows that 72% of those infected aboard the Diamond Princess were asymptomatic. Previously, the estimated percentage of asymptomatic individuals onboard was 46.5.
USS Theodore Roosevelt: Of the 1,102 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 onboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, 60% were asymptomatic. Only seven were hospitalized, and one person died.
Charles de Gaulle: 1,046 sailors out of 1,760 on board the French aircraft carrier tested positive for the virus. There were zero deaths, and two remain hospitalized. According to the NYT, about half were asymptomatic.
Prisons: Prisons seem to have an especially high rate of asymptomatic cases. According to Reuters, a tally of 3,277 inmates in state prison systems in Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia who had tested positive for the virus showed that 96% of those who tested positive were asymptomatic. 1,300 tested positive in one Tennessee prison: 98% were asymptomatic, six were hospitalized and one died. An entire female prison in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, was tested, and 85% were positive, but three-quarters were asymptomatic.
Pregnant women in labor: A groups of doctors at the New York–Presbyterian Allen Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center tested 215 women delivering babies between March 22 and April 4, 2020. This is a good random sample, because they were not tested based on symptoms. The result: 33 tested positive, and 29 of those were initially asymptomatic. Three of the initial 29 asymptomatic patients eventually developed symptoms of the virus, which would mean that in total, 79% were asymptomatic.
Meatpacking plants: 412 out of 2,367 workers at Triumph Foods plant in St. Joseph, Missouri, tested positive. All of them were asymptomatic, and there have been zero deaths among those workers so far.
Homeless population: A Boston homeless shelter tested the 408 residents and found that 36% tested positive, of which 87.8% were asymptomatic.
Nursing homes: Even in nursing homes, with a sick and elderly population that is more susceptible to fatal cases of COVID-19, many of them are still asymptomatic. A survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine at an anonymous nursing home found that more than half with positive results were asymptomatic. In another nursing home in Washington state, 56% of those who tested positive were asymptomatic. One nursing home in Miami County, Ohio, tested every resident last week, and so far all of those who tested positive are still asymptomatic.
4 huge implications of this data
1) Initially, the “experts” used the fear of asymptomatic transmission as a means of pushing for universal lockdown. But that only makes sense if the number of asymptomatic are a minority and we are at the beginning of the transmission phase, in which such lockdown could work. Now we see the opposite is true. The overwhelming majority of those infected are asymptomatic, which grows to an absolute super-majority when you factor in the mildly symptomatic. The fatality rate is therefore very small and very confined to a known population. Thus, it makes no sense to lock down younger and healthier people who overwhelmingly don’t get seriously ill, much less deathly ill, even if they contract the virus.
Moreover, the fact that this has spread so far and wide and most are asymptomatic demonstrates that there is no longer any “spread” to stop and we were months too late in trying to stop it even if we wanted to.
Clearly, this tweet from the World Health Organization did not age well.
World Health Organization (WHO)
✔
@WHO
Asymptomatic #2019nCoV infection may be rare, and transmission from an asymptomatic person is very rare with other coronaviruses, as we have seen with MERS. Thus, transmission from asymptomatic cases is likely not a major driver of transmission
http://bit.ly/36QhfKq
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