Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

At no point did I say or suggest people not showing symptoms are incapable of infecting someone with cv19. I'm not sure where you've come to the conclusion this conversation was ever about asymptomatic spread. PCR tests have nothing to do with symptoms.

However, I am very familiar with the study you've linked. If you can even call it a study - it's more like a fantasy model based on the data of other studies the researchers appear to not even have read! They cite numbers from multiple papers that can't be found in those papers anywhere. There might not be a more embarrassing study I've read than this one.

There first citation to Lee et. al. claims the paper found 100% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals, yes 100%. here's a quote from the actual paper

> Although the high viral load we observed in asymptomatic patients raises a distinct possibility of a risk for transmission, our study was not designed to determine this

(you'll note at nowhere in the paper is there anything resembling 100% spread in asymptomatic compared to symptomatic...this number is purely fabricated from thin air)

another citation from that paper is a citation to char et. al. that says the paper claims 40-140% infectiousness for asymptomatic individuals...again let's read the actual paper they cite

here's a quote from the paper

> In the household setting, symptomatic case-patients had 2.7 times the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their close contacts, compared with asymptomatic and presymptomatic case-patients

so the above paper deals with household settings and finds roughly 1/3 in a household setting...this paper very generously makes up numbers again to cite to this paper...embarrassing.

the cite mc evoy et. al. as having a finding of 40-70% which they got right! horray!

so 2/3 papers they use to determine their asymptomatic infectious number for their modeling are just garbage citations that don't resemble the findings of the source paper at all

this paper is worse than useless.

again, their model sets the infectiousness rate of asymptomatic individuals based on 3 citations - 2 of which are fabricated...garbage...utter garbage.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: