Faohi.

I cannot open your link but your quoted part states:
“”We did not observe significantly different viral loads in nasal swabs between symptomatic and asymptomatic subjects, suggesting the same potential for transmitting the virus,” the paper said.””

Note “suggesting the same potential for transmitting the virus”. Well I suggest that that is not the case because if that was the case this group of asymptomatic people would spread the virus resulting in new symptomatic cases. Since this is not the case we can assume that asymptomatic virus positive people don’t spread thus have a RO of zero.

Bojo you miss the point. The point is that apparently the RO number of these asymptomatic carriers is near if not zero. We know this because no more symptomatic cases develop.

For days now the daily change of the total number of infected cases is equal to the number of imported cases meaning that there is no detectable spread of home-grown cases. Be happy with that instead of trying to find your zombie spreaders.

I know that medical data is often polished up for all kind of reasons but you can look at things is various ways: you can state that asymptomatic positive people are not part of the caseload because they are not ill (And form no danger because they do not spread). We only know of these cases because they were tested. We do not know how many people carry the virus because they were not tested. Including only the tested asymptomatic cases gives us therefore not the total number of people who got the virus and therefore it is still not a useful number.

The Chinese authorities chose to tally the total number as the people who got sick. This actually is a useful number.

Finding the total number of people that picked up the virus can only be done with a large scale study testing for antibodies. A lot of work and that number might not even be relevant in the bigger picture.

Mind you I am not saying the problem is over. It still can relapse. But this is more likely to come now from imported cases and home-grown not discovered yet cases.

Janjal the answer on your question is not easy because one has to understand the underplaying reasoning of various governments. In general China thinks it still can manage society while in most western countries they have realised that they cannot and therefore concluded that they have to accept that Covid-19 is here to stay. There are countless examples of the failure of social distancing that failed in the western world while in China it largely did work. China as well had a track record of, at the end, stamping out SARS, and the lessons learned from that were put in to practise now. Few other countries took serious lessons from that.

Different to European counties, China had as well the spare capacity to draw from a fast country to deal with what in the end was basically a regional problem.

There are three ways to overcome Covid-19 : Number 1, and the best, is a working vaccine. Two and three are an effective medical cure and heard immunity. China believes that by applying effective control measures it will buy enough time to develop a vaccine. Given the emergency they don’t have any problem with fast tracking vaccine development. In western countries this is more problematic because of medical standards and ethics.

Trump thinks a miracle cure is possible and puts all his hopes on new and old medicines. In Europe this is considered wishful thinking.

Given the timeframe for these different scenarios some European countries realised that they didn’t have any other option then to go for heard immunity. Not because it is the best but because it is the only realistic option. One has to realise that these countries have very open societies and in practise open borders.

In my work, already a long time ago, I learned that with epidemics it is not the disease that is the problem but the collapse of the health system and the possibility of total panic. The disease is a given fact and you deal with it. Panic and collapse are much harder to deal with (and have grave consequences for the powers that be).

The main thing during an epidemic event is to flatten the curve till a level that the healthcare system and other parts of society can deal with. In China they managed to do this and South Korea is nearly there. Taking half and insufficient measures let to the situation we have now in most of the western world. I know of only one western country that had the guts to take the right measure in time and that is New Zealand (But they had plenty of time to see other countries fail.).

At the end it will be heard immunity that is created by a fast group of recovered patients and by those vaccinated that will get this disease at manageable levels like for instance the flu.

Manageable levels, by the way is what society thinks it is. Every year there are 1.5 million people dying of tuberculoses and “we” think that’s acceptable. For tuberculoses, which has been around since humans started to walk on two legs, never a vaccine was found and medical cures turn out to be only limited in their effectiveness.

Well Bojo I am just passing on information. By referring to state media I know how to judge this information namely that it is the government’s version of the truth.

Asymptomatic Covid-19 infected persons are only found because they are tested to start with. This testing was done because they were in close contact with a person who was tested because they showed symptoms. The trigger for the test and their discovery is thus related to somebody with symptoms.

The near zero discovery of home grown positive cases at this moment shows that asymptomatic cases don’t spread the disease in significant numbers. And are therefore luckily insignificant in the whole picture.

I quote from one of your linked to articles: “A new study suggests there were 37,400 people with the virus in Wuhan who authorities did not know about, and who had mild or no symptoms but could still be contagious.”

Note the words “COULD still be”. Well with Wuhan now already for days being new cases free this indicates that they are not.

Now that more tests are available I think it is a good thing that people coming into the country are tested (And spend time in preventive quarantine).

At this moment there are only two countries that managed to flat-line the curve, China because of rigorous measures and South Korea because of large scale testing. This large scale testing discovers asymptomatic cases as well but again apparently they have a near zero RO number. Still the positive tests of asymptomatic cases are useful because it improves (self) isolation of these cases which they might have more lax with if they were tested negative.

Personally I think test positive cases should be included in the total positive case number.

The counting of asymptomatic cases and how it fits in the total tally is explained here:
covid-19.chinadaily.com.cn/[...]
Turns out that if they are found they still will be placed in quarantine.