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Asymptomatic spread was the answer given to the great question: I’m not sick so why should I have to be locked down? Why are we quarantining the healthy? And what possibly could it mean, in any case, to be sick without symptoms? Why are half the PCR-positive tests assigned to people who otherwise seem to be perfectly fine?
All these valid questions came to be answered by this one phrase: asymptomatic spread. You might not feel sick. You might not ever have symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. Still, you could be an even worse super spreader without knowing it, infecting people all around you who will carry it to people who will die from the disease. This was also the moment when, subtly and imperceptibly, we were being asked to think of our fellow citizens not as human beings with dignity and rights but pathogen-carrying disease vectors. We had to be masked, all of us, because we are secretly filthy and unclean: we cannot be allowed to breath near others, so even with a mask we must stay 6 feet away.
(As I type these words, I feel sure that if anyone reads them in ten years, the reader will assume I’m writing fiction or engaged in wild hyperbole. To the future reader: this is all true.)
[...]
In this case, the carrier of rationality is a gigantic study conducted in Wuhan, China, of 10 million people. The article appears in Nature Communications, published November 20, 2020.
The conclusion is not that asymptomatic spread is rare or that the science is uncertain. The study revealed something that hardly ever happens in these kinds of studies. There was not one documented case. Forget rare. Forget even Fauci’s previous suggestion that asymptomatic transmission exists but not does drive the spread. Replace all that with: never. At least not in this study for 10,000,000.
"Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown."
One might suppose that this would be huge news. It would allow us to open up everything immediately. With the whole basis for post-curve-flattening lockdowns crumbled, we could go back to living a normal life. The fear could evaporate. We could take comfort in our normal intuition that healthy people can get out and about with no risk to others. We could take off our masks. We could go to movies and sports events.
From what I can tell, there was only one news story that was posted about this. It was on Russia Today. I’ve not been able to find another one. People not following the right accounts on Twitter wouldn’t even know about it at all.
We keep hearing about how we should follow the science. The claim is tired by now. We know what’s really happening. The lockdown lobby ignores whatever contradicts their narrative, preferring unverified anecdotes over an actual scientific study of 10 million residents in what was the world’s first major hotspot for the disease we are trying to manage. You would expect this study to be massive international news. So far as I can tell, it is being ignored.
https://www.aier.org/article/asympto...ead-revisited/
All these valid questions came to be answered by this one phrase: asymptomatic spread. You might not feel sick. You might not ever have symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. Still, you could be an even worse super spreader without knowing it, infecting people all around you who will carry it to people who will die from the disease. This was also the moment when, subtly and imperceptibly, we were being asked to think of our fellow citizens not as human beings with dignity and rights but pathogen-carrying disease vectors. We had to be masked, all of us, because we are secretly filthy and unclean: we cannot be allowed to breath near others, so even with a mask we must stay 6 feet away.
(As I type these words, I feel sure that if anyone reads them in ten years, the reader will assume I’m writing fiction or engaged in wild hyperbole. To the future reader: this is all true.)
[...]
In this case, the carrier of rationality is a gigantic study conducted in Wuhan, China, of 10 million people. The article appears in Nature Communications, published November 20, 2020.
The conclusion is not that asymptomatic spread is rare or that the science is uncertain. The study revealed something that hardly ever happens in these kinds of studies. There was not one documented case. Forget rare. Forget even Fauci’s previous suggestion that asymptomatic transmission exists but not does drive the spread. Replace all that with: never. At least not in this study for 10,000,000.
"Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown."
One might suppose that this would be huge news. It would allow us to open up everything immediately. With the whole basis for post-curve-flattening lockdowns crumbled, we could go back to living a normal life. The fear could evaporate. We could take comfort in our normal intuition that healthy people can get out and about with no risk to others. We could take off our masks. We could go to movies and sports events.
From what I can tell, there was only one news story that was posted about this. It was on Russia Today. I’ve not been able to find another one. People not following the right accounts on Twitter wouldn’t even know about it at all.
We keep hearing about how we should follow the science. The claim is tired by now. We know what’s really happening. The lockdown lobby ignores whatever contradicts their narrative, preferring unverified anecdotes over an actual scientific study of 10 million residents in what was the world’s first major hotspot for the disease we are trying to manage. You would expect this study to be massive international news. So far as I can tell, it is being ignored.
https://www.aier.org/article/asympto...ead-revisited/
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