The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Good News: More Evidence COVID-19 Is Less Lethal Than Most People Believe

Posted on | April 17, 2020 | 1 Comment

For some time now, it has been apparent that a large percentage of people infected with COVID-19 are either asymptomatic or have such mild symptoms that they have never been tested for the virus. From an epidemiological perspective, this is a double-edged sword. If you’re infected but asymptomatic, you can spread the disease without knowing it. This probably explains, for example, why New York City went from having just one known case in early March to having hundreds of cases within a couple of weeks. It’s possible that many who spread the virus never knew they were infected because they never had symptoms.

However, there is a bright side to this double-edged sword: If a substantial percentage of Americans have already been infected by COVID-19 without becoming sick (and never getting tested) then the fatality rate would be much lower than is suggested by the simple arithmetic based on reported cases and reported deaths from the disease. Nationally, the U.S. has 683,786 reported cases, and 34,575 reported deaths, which would mean 5% death rate. The rate is much lower in some states; Florida reports 24,119 cases and 686 deaths, which is a 2.8% death rate. If there are many asymptomatic people who have never been tested, however, the death rate is actually much lower. And . . .

EXAMPLE #1:

Sweeping testing of the entire crew of the coronavirus-stricken U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say.
Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.
“With regard to COVID-19, we’re learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary’s secret power,” said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.
The figure is higher than the 25% to 50% range offered on April 5 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force.

EXAMPLE #2:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now “actively looking into” results from universal COVID-19 testing at Pine Street Inn homeless shelter.
The broad-scale testing took place at the shelter in Boston’s South End a week and a half ago because of a small cluster of cases there.
Of the 397 people tested, 146 people tested positive. Not a single one had any symptoms.
“It was like a double knockout punch. The number of positives was shocking, but the fact that 100 percent of the positives had no symptoms was equally shocking,” said Dr. Jim O’Connell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, which provides medical care at the city’s shelters.
O’Connell said that the findings have changed the future of COVID-19 screenings at Boston’s homeless shelters.
“All the screening we were doing before this was based on whether you had a fever above 100.4 and whether you had symptoms,” said O’Connell. “How much of the COVID virus is being passed by people who don’t even know they have it?”

EXAMPLE #3:

The first large-scale community test of 3,300 people in Santa Clara County found that 2.5 to 4.2% of those tested were positive for antibodies — a number suggesting a far higher past infection rate than the official count.
Based on the initial data, researchers estimate that the range of people who may have had the virus to be between 48,000 and 81,000 in the county of 2 million — as opposed to the approximately 1,000 in the county’s official tally at the time the samples were taken.
“Our findings suggest that there is somewhere between 50- and 80-fold more infections in our county than what’s known by the number of cases than are reported by our department of public health,” Dr. Eran Bendavid, the associate professor of medicine at Stanford University who led the study, said in an interview with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer.

You see that the emphasis in media reporting on these results is on the negative aspect — a large number of asymptomatic cases means that spread of the infection is wider than we knew, and more difficult to detect — so that they completely ignore the upside. In the Boston homeless shelter story, for example, this is a population that, to say the least, has less-than-optimal access to health care, and yet you have 146 case in which none of the infected people even had symptoms? Similarly, in Santa Clara County, the random testing suggests there have already been tens of thousands of asymptomatic coronavirus cases in the community — people who were infected, but never got sick. And the Navy’s testing on the aircraft carrier, where most of the sailors are young people in prime physical condition, the large number of asymptomatic cases indicates that very few such people will experience anything more than mild symptoms from this coronavirus. This is good news.

We should be encouraged, and ignore the media’s negative spin.




 

Category: Health Care

Comments

One Response to “Good News: More Evidence COVID-19 Is Less Lethal Than Most People Believe”

  1. Lockdown Fascists ANZAC style - Dark Brightness
    April 20th, 2020 @ 9:35 pm

    […] You see that the emphasis in media reporting on these results is on the negative aspect — a large number of asymptomatic cases means that spread of the infection is wider than we knew, and more difficult to detect — so that they completely ignore the upside. In the Boston homeless shelter story, for example, this is a population that, to say the least, has less-than-optimal access to health care, and yet you have 146 case in which none of the infected people even had symptoms? Similarly, in Santa Clara County, the random testing suggests there have already been tens of thousands of asymptomatic coronavirus cases in the community — people who were infected, but never got sick. And the Navy’s testing on the aircraft carrier, where most of the sailors are young people in prime physical condition, the large number of asymptomatic cases indicates that very few such people will experience anything more than mild symptoms from this coronavirus. This is good news. […]