This ZeroHedge article expresses alarm about "stealth transmission," but jumps to a huge, unwarranted conclusion. Almost all of the sailors aboard the Roosevelt have been tested, the results showing that about 600 out of 4,800 contracted the virus. Of those, about 60% never showed any symptoms. The article assumes this is terrible news, because it means that asymptomatic transmission is a huge, scary risk.
But I don't see that the article makes any kind of case for asymptomatic transmission; it could be that nearly all the sailors who fell ill were infected by one of the 40% who did show symptoms. What's more, another reasonable interpretation is that we lucked out: we may be able to get to whatever percentage of the population is required for herd immunity--I've heard estimates from 40% to 80%--with less than half of those unlucky citizens suffering so much as a sniffle. Is it conceivable that people are contagious when asymptomatic? Sure, we haven't ruled that out, but even if it's true, they may still be much less contagious than people with symptoms, so there remains a lot of use in checking people for fevers and quarantining them when they're spotted. It's not uncommon for a virus to be slightly contagious when asymptomatic (or within a couple of days of becoming symptomatic) but to become wildly contagious when symptoms appear, so clamping down on people with symptoms is still effort well spent, along with tracing their contacts for the prior few days. We may miss some Typhoid Mary's, but that doesn't mean we're utterly helpless to use testing in combination with contract tracing. It's just not clear yet.
That means we are far from an ability to reassure people that coronavirus is perfectly risk-free, but so what? We don't need to reach zero risk. Not just the existence but the level of risk matters when you're considering economy-crushing curative measures. A few people will be very unlucky about this pathogen; I don't want to be among them, nor do I want my loved ones or even remote acquaintances to be among them. I also don't want anyone struck by lightning, but I'm not going to ask anyone to stay inside for the rest of his life to avoid it. We need to reach a reasonable level of confidence that we know the worst damage this thing is likely to do, then take whatever steps are sensible in light of the risk. When that happens, this really will be "sort of like the flu"--or sort of like car crashes--risks to minimize, but not at the cost of the rest of our lives and society, no matter how much we grieve for the tens of thousands of people we lose every year from the irreducible risk.
Confidence at such a level is going to take some more data about transmissibility, a grasp of what it will take to reach herd immunity, and perhaps a better understanding of why hospitals in Italy were overrun but hospitals in many other countries, like ours, were not, whether because our "inequitable" health systems are better at handling sudden emergencies, or because we're less crowded, or because doctors are getting a better handle on all kinds of potential treatments.
Update: some even weirder numbers from a Boston homeless shelter, where 146 out of 397 residents (37%) tested positive, and 100% of the positives were asymptomatic.
8 comments:
A percentage is from previous infections in November and January, that cleared up. Hence why they don't have any problems. The problem has finished detoxifying and the viruses are just there for electricity conductivity now.
Not just the existence but the level of risk matters when you're considering economy-crushing curative measures.
Not just the level of the risk, but its nature, also. It seems to me that the risks we need to be concerned about are of two types: one is the risk we'll die from the infection, and the other, which will vary widely according to individual fiscal resources, is the risk of getting sick enough to incur the expenses of hospitalization. If we get infected and don't notice, or if we get trivially enough sick that either we don't go to a doctor, or we do and she gives us some meds and sends us home to eat chicken soup and mint chocolate chip ice cream, I think that's a risk not worth taking seriously for ourselves, and only worth considering to the extent we're contagious.
We're starting to accumulate some data that inform those risks, both level and nature. This article (mostly about the impact of the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis on Wuhan Virus infection outcomes) may display an outlier, but the age breakout is pretty startling.
Regarding the Boston homeless shelter, I wonder if those folks have so many other afflictions or discomforts that they or the shelter's doctors don't notice mild Wuhan Virus symptoms and so only report asymptomatic.
Eric Hines
Homeless people are out in the environment vortex, sun, moon, stars. Thus vitality wise, they are very strong. Perhaps more well than the average.
There's a big problem with patients stuck in a bed, no sun, and without any contact with natural surfaces or an electrical grounding to the Earth. They can't recharge and they can't discharge the toxins.
Meanwhile, look at the homeless. They should be dropping off like flies, given their drug and smoke addictions. It is because they have conditioned themselves elementally.
The Russians sometimes used cold water as a conditioning tool for warriors.
4800 sailors. 4500 tested. 600 positive. 240 symptomatic. 5 hospitalized. 1 dead. And very likely the one unfortunate had a complicating circumstance.
These are not numbers that warrant panic.
And- the numbers out of Italy, NYC, Virginia- NONE of those high death rate places show any significant risk to those in good health and or under 60 years old.
What the data shows is simple- the high death rates are a lot of old and sick people dying from a virus now, instead of something else over a year or two- it is pulling the deaths of the old and sick forward, all at once, resulting in a "crisis".
So a 41 year old CPO dies of the china virus. What other health issues were there? What pre-Crozier publicity health issues would have hospitalized 500 sailors? Just how sick are they? How many recieved hydroxychloroquine and anti-biotics as treatment? Good thing we have a press corps on top of things to follow up on this.
Raven, Italy decided to get rid of the useless eaters. Anyone over 60 yo was refused life support and treatment.
This is "humanity's standards".
Instead of being angry at Y, people should perhaps look in a mirror and be angry at human standards.
Hey, who you callin "old"? I'm 63. :-) Anyway, old enough to be very careful right now, any my husband ditto.
Fred, there were only 5 hospitalizations on the ship. The 600 figure was for positive tests, of which over half had no symptoms, and most of the rest were sick but not hospital-sick. Now, it's true that on a ship full of 4,800 relatively young, healthy sailors, 5 hospitalizations is a lot, especially with even one death, but it's not cataclysmic. Worse than "only the flu," but not hugely worse.
I continue to be surprised by how only a fraction of very closed, small, intimate populations catch something that's really pretty contagious. If I'd had to guess ahead of time, I have settled on a much higher percentage. On the Diamond Princess, sometimes a husband would get it without manage to infect his wife, which I find amazing. My husband and I almost always give colds to each other.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/why_did_the_nih_fund_wuhan_labs.html#.XpsW-43xi20.twitter
America is going to explode first with confusion and then with anger.
Here comes the ROLLER COASTER.
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