Photo: Joshua Ness
Coronavirus Infection Rate. Surprising Revision & Asymptomatic Carriers:
So in a time of crisis, we all need some kind of thing we can rely on.
It helps us become reassured that the majority of Chaos is being kept at bay,
It’s a very old instinct, built right into all of us.
So when faced with an uncured pandemic, we tend to have some kind of trust for numbers coming out of official-sounding data sources,
But recent discoveries may revise the reality of the numbers we thought we had right…
I Guess The Old Models Were Wrong:
During the coronavirus outbreak, a few of the surest-seeming sources of info have been the Johns Hopkins data map of cases,
And the local broadcasts by state governors on new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by people like Andrew Cuomo, Dr. Fauci, and the people at the CDC.
Well, it turns out that there was a hidden factor behind their estimates that could make them all wrong now!
In a recent briefing by CDC director Robert Redfield, he informed us that the previous estimate of US cases was about 2.3 Million.
In reality, the actual number of cases for the disease is likely Ten Times that number, at more than 25 Million at the time of this writing.
New Testing, New Data:
The reason is that in the earliest types of testing that municipalities did,
They used a certain set of symptoms you’ve heard about as a guide.
1) Fever or chills
2) Cough
3) Shortness of Breath or Difficulty Breathing
4) Headache
5) Fatigue
And a few others.
But what they didn’t plan for, and also couldn’t easily test-for, was a completely different set of people.
The ones Dr. Michael Osterholm talked about back on the Joe Rogan Experience: Asymptomatic Carriers.
You Can Absolutely Have Coronavirus And Not Know It:
Those people who showed little to no symptoms at-all and were generally young and healthy.
-Who also, by the way, are the most dangerous carriers because they’re the ones most likely to spread the disease,
Because they have no idea they have it.
And the new results the CDC talked about bear that out.
Their new tests that indicate Antibodies as a result of already having had the disease and recovered,
Suggest that new multiplier. 10x.
There are likely at-least an order of magnitude more people out there who have or have-had the disease than anyone thought, right here in this country!
So keep your distance and keep your masks on!
Big Study Reveals Big Population Of Asymptomatic Carriers:
-Which brings us to the second part of this post.
Asymptomatic carriers are a WAY bigger force than anyone previously thought.
New work by The Scripps Institute, independent of the CDC’s efforts, looked at 16 different groups of people infected with coronavirus.
The percentage of subjects found to have had the disease yet no symptoms at all, was startling.
In some cases like military or cruise ships, as high as 60-80% of the infected people showed no symptoms.
With all the other groups of the total 45,000+ subjects examined, that number came down to an average of about 45%.
Longer Infection Window, Higher Infection Density:
More worrisome still, is that not only do these people have no idea they have the disease,
Their infectious period was also found to last even longer than the standard 14-day quarantine number we’ve all clung to for our serious isolation efforts.
One more note on that danger is that depending on the environment, anywhere from 1.7% to 60% of a given population can test positive for the virus.
These rates go from low in residential home type settings, to very high the denser the population gets, peaking with the highest rates on military ships.
So this group of people is out there infecting even more of the population than previously-thought.
Your Actual Risk Of Getting Infected With Coronavirus Might Be As High As 50%:
And as a result, that actually makes it almost a coin-flip whether or not any on individual could have the disease caused by COVID-19,
Despite the earlier data suggesting that only .7 percent of the US population had it.
-Which we know from the previous section is likely more like almost 8 percent by now.
This unfortunately comes at a time when Federal efforts to support testing are being withdrawn in many locations,
New areas of the country are experiencing drastic increases in just the confirmed number of cases,
And testing is being pushed-off more and more to the state and local-level for responsibility.
So until we get a vaccine, it remains very imporant to keep practicing the CDC’s guidelines of mask use and social-distancing,
Because based on these new stats, you really never know who is infected with coronavirus because they just won’t look any different.
References & Links:
• Sources: CDC Telebriefing – 10x Infected Cases | Scripps | AIM – Prevalence of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infection
• More Coverage: CDC Safety Guidelines
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