Were Fears of Asymptomatic Covid Spread Overblown?
Fears about silent spreaders of Covid — who suffer no symptoms but can pass the virus to others — were almost certainly overblown, according to a huge new study. MailOnline has more.
A study of nearly 30,000 people has found asymptomatic carriers are about 68% less likely to pass the virus on than those who get sick.
No 10 used concerns about asymptomatic spread to justify forcing Britons to obey lockdowns and wear masks.
They were thought to account for up to a third of all infections and many scientists claimed asymptomatic patients were just as infectious as the sick.
But a new global study spanning 42 countries, including the U.K. and U.S., found they were only responsible for as little as 14% of cases.
They also estimate that their overall risk of passing the virus to someone else “about two-thirds lower”.
Scientists claimed Covid’s ability to spread asymptomatically was one of the reasons for harsh social curbs.
During one of the national lockdowns in January 2021, the Government said about a third of people with Covid had no symptoms and urged people to “act like you’ve got it”.
Experts analysed data from 130 studies from 42 countries.
They involved 28,426 people who caught Covid between April 2020 and July 2021.
Of these patients, nearly 12,000 had an asymptomatic infection, having tested positive on a PCR but having suffered no symptoms.
All of the studies included the results of community screening programmes, contact tracing, and investigations into specific outbreaks like on cruise ships.
They found the ‘secondary attack rate’, how likely people infected with Covid are to pass the virus to others, was 68% lower for asymptomatic cases, compared to those with symptoms.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: You can read the paper In PLOS Medicine – “Occurrence and transmission potential of asymptomatic and presymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections: Update of a living systematic review and meta-analysis” – here.
Stop Press 2: The investigation of the impact of lockdowns on Covid mortality published in Studies in Applied Economics that I posted about earlier today concludes that the lockdowns in March of last year saved fewer than 10,000 lives in Europe and the U.S. combined. MailOnline has more.
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“Huge new study”
Where were these studies when we were saying this in March 2020?
Actually, Prof David Miles of Imperial University did one & came up with pretty much this calculation in July 2020 LIVING WITH COVID-19: BALANCING COSTS AGAINST BENEFITS IN THE FACE OF THE VIRUS | National Institute Economic Review | Cambridge Core
It’s pretty obvious when you consider that a high viral load causes symptoms so when you cough more virions are released. No symptoms, low viral load and less virions released.
What, that Professor David Miles, the economist, of Imperial College? Yes, that Imperial College.
What I still can’t get over is how none of my peers (apart from most direct family members) saw the absurdity of it all. I mean, if I as a healthy individual can unwittingly kill/harm someone simply by doing what I must do to stay alive (i.e. breathe) then I should just die now, yes? Ergo… the premise was false, therefore everything which followed was always going to be absurd.
Reductio ad absurdum. But so few could see it. Amazing.
The asymptomatic LIE effectively means every single day of your life when you thought you were healthy you were actually a walking germ machine capable of killing others………asymptomic transmission is utter made up garbage by crooks and believed by complete idiots!! Although so is most of the germ theory
Total fear-pornery for cranking-up the fear of hypochondriacs.
Deliberately making people afraid is designed to stop them thinking and obey = red flag immediately.
Nailed it.. As did Dr Zach Bush when he said the same thing in his interview with Dell Bigtree
I’m so grateful to LS for exposing these crimes.
You’ve been my go to site for the last 2 years.
Please keep banging on about it.
WE WILL BE VINDICATED!!!
No. You will become feral and Toby will hit you with an iron bar.
Silver lining, eh. I’ve learnt more from Below the Line here since April 2020 than an entire lifetime reading MSM.
Seconded.
On matters C1984 I am now more than a match for the majority of NHS staff I come in to contact with and have been since about May 2020; I can include Drs, Nurse Practitioners, specialists including lab scientists and all nursing grades.
Any doctor, nurse practitioner, ‘health auxiliary’ who wears a mask is a willing collaborator if the dark forces behind this scam.
Yes!
We knew pretty much everything we needed to know about Covid from the Diamond Princess data in March/April 2020.
That was my feeling then and nothing I have come across since has changed my mind.
same.
Not forgetting other cruise liners that were similar petri dish environments. Also I seem to remember that there was an American aircraft carrier with thousands of personnel onboard which Covid swept through and nobody was seriously ill.
Proper science is based on the Empirical Scientific Method developed by the philosopher Francis Bacon in the early 17th C. After observing, measuring and gathering evidence you draw a conclusion. Before the Empirical Scientific Method we had Alchemy where you had the conclusion (ie making gold) and you worked to get to the conclusion. It would appear that observation, evidence and measurement has been ditched and Alchemy is the order of the day.
Our response to covid was religion, not science.
Of course, they hid this by saying ‘follow the science’ at every opportunity.
It wasn’t that for me.
It was the legislation making it much easier to overcount covid deaths.
I knew it was a scam from that point.
Absolutley this. I took this data and 1st hand reports in early 2020 from a Briton in Wuhan who for about a week was the BBCs goto guy for information. He had the infection and said it was a mild flu, nothing to worry about and he was surviving on hot toddys.
I knew we’d gone down the rabbit hole the day the library book I’d ordered went into 72 hours quarantine, only for the public library to shut for the duration 48 hours later.
For me, in Feb-Mar 2020, another thing which told me it was all BS was a minute of simple research and thirty seconds of primary school arithmetic.
Daily all cause mortality counts, piped to the “smart” phones in people’s pockets every day were nothing out of the ordinary for a regular winter flu. Yet everyone assumed they were indicating a terrible pandemic.
‘Why else would they be telling us,’ they asked me.
The last piece of official Government communication I have paid any attention to is their statement that Covid was being downgraded to a Low Consequence Infectious Disease because of low mortality rates.
Everything that came afterwards was bovine excrement.
Same here, “they” implied catching CoronaV in London was much more likely and more deadly than being stuck on the Diamond Princess; that confirmed the hoax for us too; …
…plus all in our family had already come down with weird fever-flu symptoms in February 2020 which we had never experienced by any of us (in a household with 125 combined years on the planet) but which led to one day off school for each kid but no missed work days for anyone else.
Recently, the loathsome Wankok blamed the slaughter of old people in care homes on the fact that the ‘experts’ didn’t know about asymptomatic transmission.
Nice circle to square, eh?
It’s good to see them squirming and tying themselves up in knots!
Couldn’t that murderer pronounce Midazolam?? or had he forgot the 300%+ rise in it’s ‘usage’ during the first mortality peak?
or was that because it was used while they were murdered by unnecessary ventilators (notice that MSM memory-holed)?
What Always baffled me was how can they know it’s 1 in 3 who spread it without knowing because they had no symptoms. Complete BS from the start!
Prior to lockdown 1 a QALY, (quality adjusted life year) was priced at about £30,000, the state was prepared to spend about £30,000 to prolong a life for a year, though this tended to a lower figure as the patient aged. So, how many Qaly’s were lost with the average death? Even though the average life expectancy & the average Covid fatality is about 82 this doesn’t mean that the there were zero lost years. In fact, if you reach 82 you’ll, on average live about another 10 years. However, the people who did die tended to be the elder, sicker, more vulnerable, so lets say the average lost years was 5 years.
The study says lockdowns saved 10,000 lives (I don’t believe it) but OK. On a QALY basis that’s 10,000 x £30,000 x 5 years = £1.5bn. In fact we spent about £500bn, that’s about 333 x as pre covid we would have spent to save a life year.
We should have been doing qaly right from the start — all the talk of ‘all lives are precious’ was moronic.
We’re currently suffering the reverse of this — measuring vaccine side effects as though the age of the individual didn’t matter.
Norman Fenton works out the average 82 year old who succumbed while SARS2 infected would have most likely lived an extra 2 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSqjZ71GWCY
Life expectancy: a counterfactual example
All because the PCR testing at 45 cycles will find traces of sars cov 2, but it does not mean the virus is active and/or infectious. Mike Yeadon was saying this back in mid2020, but the psyops ploughed on pushing the 1 in 3 lie to reinforce compliance with the useless regulations. We, on this site, knew this 2 years ago, and said so repeatedly. And were effectively labelled enemies of the state!
And Yeadon backed up by experimental data a few weeks later.
For Ct = 25, 70% correlation with growth of viable viral culture reported in Clinical Infectious Diseases, Correlation Between 3790 Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction–Positives Samples and Positive Cell Cultures, Including 1941 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Isolates, whereas Ct = 35-40 gave only 3% correlation with viable viral culture.
Those 5 extra cycles magnify error 128 times.
“Stop Press 2: The investigation of the impact of lockdowns on Covid mortality published in Studies in Applied Economics that I posted about earlier today concludes that the lockdowns in March of last year saved fewer than 10,000 lives in the U.K. and U.S. combined. MailOnline has more.”
So 10,000 lives allegedly saved in the UK and “USA”. Presumably therefore less than 2,000. On “covid” mortality alone rather than net, if I understand this correctly. And by the estimate of SAGE, 75,000 (or was it 150,000?) were expected to die from the lockdowns (July 2020?). But they locked down anyway, presumably just in case, or for political power. There were always likely to be more deaths from lockdowns than extra deaths from “covid”. It has to be asked, are those responsible fit for office (or indeed freedom)?
Can I add the failure to do a proper cost-benefit analysis on lockdoewns to their crimes against humanity (before the “online harms bill” bans me…)?
https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/20/coronavirus-lockdown-cause-200000-extra-deaths-13014848/
Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’ Comment
Sam Courtney-Guy
Monday 20 Jul 2020 5:39 pm
Always considered ‘asymptomatic covid’ as dodgy a concept as ‘long covid’ or ‘cases’ based on inaccurate testing methods but didn’t need an ‘expert’ or ‘study’ to tell me that I was being lied to and an attempt made at psychological fear-mongering.
Your Government loves and cares for you. To do so, it lies to you, terrorises you and threatens you with bodily harm. In doing these things, it has corrupted Society.
It does all that because TPTB know us and we frighten then, because they know we hate and would happily slowly strangle them.
This is a tadge off topic, so apologies (it’s loosely related as it’s an example of censorship of opinion), but if you’re a Daily Telegraph subscriber and comment in a contradictory way on articles, then you may not realise you’ve been censored. Your comments will still appear to be getting posted, but actually they are only visible to you. You will receive no notification of this change whatsoever – literally none. The DT was never great, but it’s become another cheerleader of the deep state. We’re well past anything Orwell could have even have dreamt of.
I think it’s called ‘shadow banning.’ I realised it when I logged into my local paper online – I could see my comments. Soon as I logged out, I couldn’t. Crafty bastards.
The DT also has a nasty habit of removing comments completely when commenters give the wrong answer, e.g. dissenters to recent article on proposed third booster this autumn.
Meanwhile any article written under the Gates mouthpiece Global Health Security is rarely open to comment in the first place.
I wrote to my MP quoting the critical recent studies of asymptomatic spread of Covid and asked him what science he relied upon when he voted for lockdowns. I will be waiting a long time for a meaningful reply.
The Science of Self Interest.
The only thing that matters in the course of the national mindset is the upcoming “enquiry”. And that’s a closed shop.
These studies gather dust.
Asymptomatic spread and PCR Ct values overblown, prior immunity discounted.
So much for following The Science.
Oh “The Science” was followed alright, it was Science that was ignored.
HSE Ireland gone ‘feral’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLUwaA4YCkU
Like/Dislike and Comments turned off – I guess the NWO is soo amazing the servers couldn’t cope with all the positive feedback?! Yeah must be that….
Does SP2 have any credibility?
Please provide the source of your quote.
I laugh at the idea that a spot of number-crunching could pick out a number as small as 10,000. Heavens, we don’t even know the number of deaths caused by Covid with anything like that accuracy.
Also: the toll of the lockdowns will take years to accumulate. How did they allow for that?
Put otherwise: I’ll bet they didn’t.
“The results of our meta-analysis support the conclusion that lockdowns in the spring of 2020 had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” Stone the crows! Who’da thunk it?
No, they weren’t overblown they were completely fabricated.
It was always rather odd that so much emphasis was placed on asymptomatic transmission.
It really did smell of a policy designed to suppress the freedoms of those that clearly didn’t have an infection of any relevance.
Ie, part of project fear, not ‘follow the science’.
Yes indeed, asymptomatic transmission was an essential component of the propaganda. What’s astonishing is that medical experts barely seemed to challenge it. The power of persuasion and groupthink.
If we feel totally fit and well but must act like we are dangerous to others, then life as we know it is over.
That’s why I knew it was bullshit.
So where and to whom do I address my blistering letter of complaint – Cabinet Secretary? Ofcom? Vallance?
It’ll do no good but will make me feel better. I did complain in 2020 to Advertising Standards about the scare ads but they reckoned the fear porn was ‘proportionate’.
Somebody needs to start getting payback for all the lies they told and the misery they caused.
What percentage of ‘cases’ are asymptomatic has always been a very important question. One way the public could have gotten a better answer to this is simply check the testing results from some cohort that was tested all the time. Such a cohort is college and pro athletes, who had to be tested at least 3 times every week for months. Positive tests resulted not only in the positive athlete being quarantined but also every non-positive athlete this person had a close contact with. Because of these protocols, scores of athletes were disqualified from practicing or participating in games. Because of this, many games were cancelled, which resulted in untold economic losses for university athletic programs and the cities that hosted these big games. I’ve always thought these tests could give us answers on how serious a risk this virus posed to young athletes. If most athletes were actually asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms, the public would learn that the health risk to these young athletes was tiny, which it of course was and is. (As far as I am aware, to this day no professional or college athlete in America has died from Covid). I actually contacted the… Read more »
I spent six months acting like I had covid; coughing all the time and collapsing on the street. I’m still not convinced it did any good.
I’ve only got through the first few pages, but the second study referenced seems comprehensive and worth a read if anyone still cares / has the energy.
Not perfect, but it’s nuanced and has sensible disclaimers and backs up a lot of what people here argue in that the positive effects of lockdown tend to be massively overhyped in conventional media.
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/05/A-Systematic-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-of-COVID-19-Mortality-II.pdf
how does one “act like you got it”? are you supposed to fake sneeze and cough and run your head under the hot tap for a high temp?
You wear your face nappy over your head and you then stand near true face-wearing Branch Covidian believers in supermarkets to show them that you also follow the rules and ‘The Science’.
Asymptomatic transmission was always a fraud, but as a means of terrifying the zombies, it was brilliant. No matter how well they felt, they were convinced they’d got It. And every single person they met, however healthy-looking, was riddled with covvie and a carrier of death. The remaining muzzleoids still believe this.
The asymptomatic lie justified everything: incarceration, muzzling, bullying, snitching, permanent terror, wishing death on the filthy carriers who refused to be exorcised by the Jabbo Jumbo. The most potent lie in the covvie thugs’ armoury of lies.
Just wait for asymptomatic monkeypox…..
Just wait for asymptomatic monkeypox…..
= Achimptomatic.
Nothing quite like repeating a somewhat lame joke that’s been going around on the Internet for the past 2 weeks.
Probably even less if they took into account pre-symptomatic versus true asymptomatic.
The “acting” like you’ve got it, and “playing” your part, the “drama” passes, covid theatrics in shops and businesses, and the meaningless applauding of the thin air…that became the almighty sh*t show it was, and it still ain’t over! Mind you I walked out during the first scene.