Quote:
Originally Posted by skywatch
My personal belief has always been that there might not be any such thing as asymptomatic spread - just running too many cycles on the flawed PCR tests that detect such minute traces of COVID DNA (still a "positive"). If you run enough cycles on a sample, you could could be finding a very old infection, or an infection of something like COVID but not, or something else entirely. Google it; this is a known, medically understood flaw in our testing programs.
So you have people that are not close to infectious testing positive, and then have to try to figure out how they got COVID-19? must have been the mysterious asymptomatic transmission.
Here is an excellent, recent article on asymptomatic spread from the British Medical Journal
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4851
In short, asymptomatic spread is much less of a thing than initially estimated. Based on whar they know now they thini asymptomatic spread accounts for less than 20% of the cases.
However, many people who were initially thought to be asymptomatic went on to develop symptoms later, so were really pre-symptomatic. Pre-symptomatic people play a significant role in transmission as they carry enough life virus to be contagious without having symptoms yet.
The article also talks about the limitations of PCR testing as the sole criterion for determining infection.