I had written previously that I don’t want to write about “COVID” any more. But, if something comes up I feel compelled to write about it.
So now I hear that a study was done, published on May 13th, 2020, “A study on infectivity of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers,” by Ming Gao, Lihui Yang, Xuefu Chen, Yiyu Deng, Shifang Yang, Hanyi Xu, Zixing Chen, and Xinglin Gao, of Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital and Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences of Guangdong, China. That link is at the U.S. National Institutes of Health website.
The researchers’ conclusions: “Infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak. Effective prevention and control measures are helpful to prevent COVID-19 spread of asymptomatic carriers. The result of this study may alleviate parts of the public concern about asymptomatic infected people.”
Now, there seem to be typos and misspellings (as well as possible minor Chinese-to-English translation issues), and so I’m not really sure about this study. There don’t seem to be many references to it online (maybe because of the Trump-Pompeo China-hate going on, I don’t know).
But, if there are any other researchers who want to do a study like this, maybe using a larger group of study subjects, that would be helpful. Perhaps a further study with a larger group can confirm the researchers’ conclusions. (However, given that such conclusions here go against the “official narrative,” then we might not see such a follow-up study!)
If it really is true that asymptomatic “carriers” have a low chance or rate of infecting contacts or infecting the public in general, then there is NO need for the goddamn masks or “social distancing,” and all the business closures, job losses, financial collapse and this totalitarian “contact tracing” crap.
The bureaucrats who are inflicting all this on us are literally destroying society as we know it. Especially the longer this goes on. I’ve been around for 55+ years now, and I’ve never seen any of this Alfred Hitchcock movie kind of stuff. It’s totally unnecessary too, given that the infection fatality rate is a tenth of one percent.
And I wanted to give those thoughts on this first, and now I will quote from the study’s Discussion (that was also misspelled) that was on the NIH website (I didn’t copy the footnote numbers here, you’ll have to go to the page for those and other information.):
In this study, we recorded in detail the hospitalized situation, diagnostic procedure, inspection results, treatment plans and clinical outcome of an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carrier who was laboratory confirmation by RT-PCR assay, but without related symptoms and imaging changes in concert with previous reports…Also, we analyzed epidemiological and clinical data from 455 contacts who had been exposed to the asymptomatic patient. All the 455 contacts were excluded from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Of the 231 quarantined people (196 family members and 35 patients), 229 were removed from medical observation successfully and two died for severe heart failure. New or existing respiratory symptoms were almost appeared in patients, which were considered to be associated with their original disease or complications. A family member complaining of fever was diagnosed as acute tonsillitis ultimately. Unlike COVID-19, normal blood count was found in most contacts…
All CT images showed no sign of COVID-19 infection. Unquestionably, all cases tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid. This fact illustrated that there had been no cases of infection in a relatively dense space.
Since the outbreak, our hospital has taken a series of effective prevention and control measures, which made a considerable effect on preventing the spread in this case. Above all, medical staffs abide by the principle of graded protection strictly. For patients and attendants, each patient can only be accompanied by one attendant, and both need to wear personal protective equipment (PPE). Nevertheless, there is still a risk of transmission of COVID-19 under stringent measures. Primarily, shortages of PPE were common in the early stages. Medical resources were supplied to healthcare workers priorly. Due to these factors, patients and attendants can only wear one mask for a long time, resulting in its ineffective. Besides, we noticed that some patients and relatives wore PPE incorrectly due to the lack of adequate training, which was also possible for hospital staffs. Last but not least, it is unavoidable to take off mask while eating or drinking, which provides an opportunity to spread the virus.
Considering all the mentioned factors, we suggest that there are more important reasons for achieving “Zero infection”. As is well-known, person-to-person transmission through respiratory droplets is the main route of COVID-19 transmission…Earlier research revealed that the viral load of respiratory tract samples in an asymptomatic patient was similar to that in the symptomatic patients…
However, a single sample is difficult to be representative. In the light of “Zero infection” for this case, we venture to guess that the viral load of respiratory tract samples in the asymptomatic patient might not be high. Moreover, although pathogenic nucleic acids can be detected in respiratory tract samples from asymptomatic carriers, the opportunity of transmission is less than that in symptomatic patient owing to the absence of the way expelling pathogen via cough and sneezing.
Based on the foregoing discussion, we conclude that the infectivity of some asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers might be weak. This finding implicates that there is not needful to worry unduly for asymptomatic or mild patients during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, excessive virus nucleic acid detection is unnecessary, which can relieve the pressure on public health resources. Under the development of epidemic circumstance, more and more public concerns on the increasing number of asymptomatic or mild patients hid in the community. However, combined with our results and the defense measures currently completed, we hope such worries are misplaced and we also believe the world will win this battle certainly.
The limitation of our study is that there is only one case and lack of detailed information on family members quarantined locally. Large-scale multicenter studies are needed to verify our conclusion. However, both asymptomatic carrier and 455 contacts were admitted to and treated in designated places. Hence, the study results are representative to some extent.